Cardinal determiners and the clausal analysis of exceptives

This note presents a novel observation and proposes a modification of an existing analysis to account for it. The novel observation is that an exceptive, i.e. an adverbial phrase headed by the word "except", gives rise to oddness when the noun phrase containing it as an adjunct is combined with a cardinal determiner, i.e. one which comes with a presupposition about the number of elements in the denotation of its complement. Thus, there is a contrast between the sentence "all members of the Beatle except John Lennon gave an interview", which is perfectly acceptable, and the sentence "all four members of the Beatles except John Lennon gave an interview", which is odd, the difference between "all" and "all four" being that the latter presupposes that its complement NP denotes a set containing four members. The existing analysis of exceptives which I propose to modify in order to account for such contrasts is that presented in Vostrikova (2021). According to this analysis, exceptives are eliptical clauses. Thus, Vostrikova claims that the logical form of the sentence "all members of the Beatles except John Lennon gave an interview" would be something like "all members of the Beatles gave an interview except John Lennon did not give an interview". The modification I make to Vostrikova's analysis consists in minimally changing one part in the three-part truth condition which she assigns to exceptive constructions. This minimal change results in undefinedness when noun phrases containing exceptives combine with cardinal determiners. I also present a brief discussion of the analysis of exceptives proposed by von Fintel (1993) which takes exceptives to be NP modifiers, and one proposed by Moltman (1995) which takes exceptives to be DP modifiers.