On the plurality of verbs

Over the last 15 years or so, Manfred Krifka has explored cumulativity as an important property of nominal and verbal predicates, and in the course of this work, the possibility emerged that cumulativity might correspond to a significant semantic universal. More recently, Fred Landman has defended initial cumulativity specifically for verbs. On this view, all verb denotations are pluralized from the very start. In my talk, I will discuss some surprising consequences of the Opluralization from the start¹ hypothesis for verbs and defend it against serious criticism.