Are There Pluralities of Worlds?

Abstract

Indicative conditionals and configurations with neg-raising predicates have been brought up as potential candidates for constructions involving world pluralities. I argue against this hypothesis, showing that cumulativity and quantifiers targeting a plurality’s part structure cannot access the presumed world pluralities. I furthermore argue that this makes worlds special in the sense that the same tests provide evidence for pluralities in various other semantic domains.

Acts, occasions and multiplicatives: A mereotopological account

“…So far, various proposals have argued for part-whole structures in the domains of events (Bach 1986), information states (Krifka 1996), times (Artstein & Francez 2003), degrees (Dotlačil & Nouwen 2016), roles (W ągiel 2021a) and even propositions (Lahiri 2002) and functions (Schmitt 2019). It seems that we find evidence for part-whole structures everywhere we look (with the possible exception of worlds; see Schmitt 2023) and numerous results indicate the relevance of mereology across natural language semantic representations.…”

The case for comparability

“…235–36). Geurts (2005) and Schmitt (2013) observe that the pattern extends to other categories: for example, when the ‘and’ in ‘Brown isn't tall and handsome’ is unstressed, it seems equivalent to ‘Brown is neither tall nor handsome.’ It is not obvious what explains this effect. But for present purposes, it suffices to note that the tendency to hear ‘$$x$$ is no more/less $$F$$ and $$G$$ than $$y$$’ and ‘$$x$$ is not as $$F$$ and $$G$$ as $$y$$’ as equivalent, respectively, to ‘$$x$$ is neither more/less $$F$$ nor more/less $$G$$ than $$y$$’ and ‘$$x$$ is neither as $$F$$ nor as $$G$$ as $$y$$’ is another instance of this well‐established pattern.…”