It's been observed that sentences like "the workers painted a/one room" are not easily judged true in co-varying distributive situations, i.e., situations where every worker painted a different room than all the others. In this work in progress I will explore a hypothesis according to which co-varying distributive situations are incompatible with an upper bound inference of the sentence. Specifically, the idea will be that "the workers painted a/one room" has an upper bound inference that they did not paint more than one room overall, for the same reason that "Mary painted a/one room" has the upper bound inference that she didn't paint more than one room.
