A higher-order plurality solution to Xiang's (2021) puzzle

Abstract

Xiang (2021) notes the following puzzle: plural wh-questions involving certain collective predicates are predicted to carry a uniqueness presupposition (Dayal 1996), yet intuitively they don’t (cf. Gentile & Schwarz 2020). She proposes that such questions have ‘higher-order readings’ (Spector 2007, 2008), and crucially that they have answers naming boolean conjunctions. I show that for the data she considers, recourse to higher-order question readings is mistaken: Xiang’s puzzle should be solved with higher-order plurality, and I provide empirical justification for this approach, mirroring for questions the recent findings for declaratives by Buccola, Kuhn & Nicolas (2021).