Shea Hucklebridge "Associative Plurals"

Shea Hucklebridge “Associative Plurals”

Tuesday, Sept. 19, 12-12:50 p.m.

A1045

This talk will focus on the semantics of the associative plural construction, and its instantiation across languages. The term associative plural is used here to denote a partonomic plurality where members of a group are parts of a whole that are affiliated by spatiotemporal or conceptual contiguity (Moravcsik 2003). For example, an English additive plural like Peters may only refer to a number of people named Peter. On the other hand, an associative plural like Japanese Tanaka-tachi may also denote a group composed of Tanaka and his associates (who aren’t named Tanaka). In addition to these characteristic associative readings, associative plurals exhibit a number of cross-linguistically consistent behaviours that are not obviously related to their meaning. This includes their inability to appear in generics and existential constructions, their resistance to enumeration, and their specificity. I will propose an account of this that links these characteristics with the inherent intentionality of associative plurals. Associatives begin life as an individual concept that denotes a group with membership varying across situations. This group is modified by an non-intersective article derived from the named noun (e.g. Tanaka), which introduces a relation between the group and the individual. This resulting DP is of an inappropriate type for existential constructions, generics, and numerals. Associatives formed this way are necessarily specific (although not necessarily definite) because they contain a situation variable introduced as the complement of the article (following Schwarz 2012’s analysis of strong determiners). This approach will additionally account for long-remarked on similarities between associatives and pronouns, and contribute novel observations about analogous behaviour exhibited by group nouns.

Presented by Department of Linguistics

Event Listing 2023-09-19 12:00:00 2023-09-19 12:50:00 America/St_Johns Shea Hucklebridge “Associative Plurals” This talk will focus on the semantics of the associative plural construction, and its instantiation across languages. The term associative plural is used here to denote a partonomic plurality where members of a group are parts of a whole that are affiliated by spatiotemporal or conceptual contiguity (Moravcsik 2003). For example, an English additive plural like Peters may only refer to a number of people named Peter. On the other hand, an associative plural like Japanese Tanaka-tachi may also denote a group composed of Tanaka and his associates (who aren’t named Tanaka). In addition to these characteristic associative readings, associative plurals exhibit a number of cross-linguistically consistent behaviours that are not obviously related to their meaning. This includes their inability to appear in generics and existential constructions, their resistance to enumeration, and their specificity. I will propose an account of this that links these characteristics with the inherent intentionality of associative plurals. Associatives begin life as an individual concept that denotes a group with membership varying across situations. This group is modified by an non-intersective article derived from the named noun (e.g. Tanaka), which introduces a relation between the group and the individual. This resulting DP is of an inappropriate type for existential constructions, generics, and numerals. Associatives formed this way are necessarily specific (although not necessarily definite) because they contain a situation variable introduced as the complement of the article (following Schwarz 2012’s analysis of strong determiners). This approach will additionally account for long-remarked on similarities between associatives and pronouns, and contribute novel observations about analogous behaviour exhibited by group nouns. A1045 Department of Linguistics