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Associative Plurals

Abstract
The goal of this dissertation is to present an analysis of associative plurals in Japanese, Turkish, and Armenian that captures their associative interpretation along with a series of cross-linguistically consistent behaviours that do not seem to stem directly from these special meanings. For associative plurals, group affiliation is established through spatio-temporal or conceptual contiguity rather than a shared description (Moravcsik 2003). Approaches to English-like additive plurality are unable to capture associative plurals because they predict a plurality based on similarity, where every element of a plural noun is either an element of the corresponding singular or a concatenation of those elements. I propose that unlike additives, associative plurals are formed from a contextually specified individual concept that behaves like a group noun. This accounts for data which suggests associative plurals are inherently intensional, with a life that exists across indices. I will suggest that this individual concept is introduced as the plural marker. The noun being pluralized is actually part of a complex determiner that introduces a possessive like R relation that establishes the relationship between the group and the named individual.
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dissertation
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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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