Numerous-like predicates in bare plural generics

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the unavailability of generic constructions when a bare plural is modified by ‘numerous’: for instance, ‘gathered students are loud’ has a salient generic reading roughly equivalent to ‘when they are gathered, students are loud’. ‘Numerous students are loud’, instead, only has a quantificational reading: it can only mean that the number of students being loud is high, and lacks a generic reading equivalent to ‘when students are numerous, they are loud’. We analyse this on a par with available analyses of the impossibility of restrictive modification by ‘numerous’ of referential definite plurals (Pinton 2022). In a nutshell, operators contributing maximality like the maximisation coming with the definite article make the contribution of ‘numerous’ trivial. We also consider the more complicated case of Italian, where ‘numerous’ can in fact participate in generic readings, but only in certain syntactic configurations.