The conservativity of many

Abstract

Besides their conservative cardinal and proportional meanings, many and few have been argued to allow for a ‘reverse’ proportional reading that defies the convervativity universal (Westerst˚ ahl, 1985). We develop a compositional analysis that derives the correct truth conditions for this reading while maintaining conservativity. First, an amendment is proposed to Cohen’s (2001) reverse proportional truth conditions. Second, mirroring the decomposition of other degree expressions like tall, many is decomposed into the parametrized determiner many and POS. POS is allowed to scope out of its host and scope sententially, and a comparison class C is retrieved via the (focus or contrastive topic) associate of POS. Keeping a unified conservative denotation for proportional many, the regular proportional reading obtains when POS’ associate is external to the original host NP and the reverse proportional reading arises when it is internal to the host NP. The same applies to few.