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Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8389-3032
AccessType
Open Access Dissertation
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Linguistics
Year Degree Awarded
2023
Month Degree Awarded
September
First Advisor
Seth Cable
Second Advisor
Ana Arregui
Third Advisor
Gennaro Chierchia
Fourth Advisor
Rajesh Bhatt
Fifth Advisor
Maya Eddon
Subject Categories
Semantics and Pragmatics
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.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/35958293
Recommended Citation
Hucklebridge, Sherry, "Associative Plurals" (2023). Doctoral Dissertations. 2993.
https://doi.org/10.7275/35958293
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/2993
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.