Inclusive Plurals and the Theory of Number

I argue that an account of both inclusive plurals and the crosslinguistic typology of grammatical number requires postulating a [–atomic] feature (or something very much like it) in the structure of exclusive-plural DPs. When combined with the only theory we currently have that accounts for the crosslinguistic typology of number (Harbour 2014), theories in which the exclusive-plural DPs of a language with inclusive plurals are [–atomic]-less under- or overgenerate with respect to that typology. These problems disappear as soon as the structure of exclusive plural DPs contains a component that generates exclusive-plural interpretations, either Harbour's [–atomic] feature (added to a system with a second, [–atomic]-less structure, a proposal compatible with, e.g., Farkas and de Swart 2010) or a predicate-level exhaustivity operator (from Mayr 2015).