 It is clear that in (21) ‘five’ is to be understood as ‘at most five’. How are we to model the process of utterance interpretation for this case? Are we to propose that the inference from ‘at least five’ to ‘exactly five’ takes place and is then cancelled? Or are we to propose that ‘five’ is by default ‘at least five’ (or underdetermined five, or ‘exactly five’, depending on the orientation (see Horn 1992; Koenig 1993; Bultinck 2005) and becomes altered in the process of pragmatic inference to ‘at most five’ in the context of ‘allow’? But then, ‘allow’ is also present in (22) and the inference to ‘at most’ is not at all salient: doing a longer piano practice is generally preferred but may not be what the addressee likes doing and ‘five’ may end up, in this context, to mean ‘as little as five’ or ‘five or more’, stressing that more than five is not expected but allowed. In (23), the problem is even more salient. If ‘five’ triggers locally the ‘exactly’ meaning, then the default has to be cancelled immediately afterwards when ‘are needed’ has been processed and the ‘at least’ interpretation becomes obvious.