Exceptional wide scope as cumulation

Finite complement clauses are often assumed to be scope islands for quantifier raising (QR) of universal quantifiers. However, as observed by Farkas and Giannakidou 1996; Barker 2022; Hoeks et al. 2022, a.o., there are apparent counterexamples to this claim, where a universal DP appears to scope out of a finite complement clause to take scope over a singular indefinite in the matrix clause, henceforth ‘variation readings’. Barker 2022 argues that the availability of variation readings is predicate sensitive, and attributes this predicate sensitivity to non-local QR. In this paper, based on experimental results, we challenge Barker’s conclusion. First, we demonstrate that variation readings are also possible when we replace the embedded universal quantifier with a negative indefinite, and non-local QR is insufficient to explain these cases. Second, we argue instead for the following empirical generalization: embedding predicates license variation readings if they also license a form of cumulativity in relational predication. Building on this generalization, we argue that the predicate sensitivity of both phenomena is rooted in the inferential profile of the embedding predicate (Pasternak, 2018; Harada, 2023).