Three versus At Least Three

Three versus At Least Three

The purpose of this paper is to provide a proper account for the lack of the exactly-reading of, say, at least three, though the bare numeral three is typically understood as "exactly three". My analysis is based on the No Redundancy Principle (NPR), according to which every meaningful expression in a sentence or a text must be non-redundant: Either it must make a contribution to the truth-conditional interpretation, or otherwise its occurrence must be pragmatically licensed. Assuming that the NPR is a rule that regulates all the interpretation processes, I show that the principle provides a natural solution to the puzzle raised by at least.