{"title":"Similative plurality and the nature of alternatives","authors":"Ryan Smith","doi":"10.3765/sp.13.15","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates the properties of similative plurals, focusing on m-reduplication in Persian and -toka and -tari in Japanese. Although these expressions are associated with what I refer to as a non-homogeneous plural inference in upward-entailing contexts, I demonstrate that this inference is not an entailment of sentences with these morphemes, but is merely implicated, much like the multiplicity condition associated with English bare plurals (Krifka 2004; Spector 2007; Zweig (2009); de Swart & Farkas 2010). I propose an analysis of similative plurals as mereological mixtures of a set with a set of contextually similar objects, and derive the non-homogeneous plural reading via scalar implicature. I demonstrate that deriving this implicature requires both the calculation of implicature at a subsentential level (Chierchia 2004; Chierchia 2006; Zweig 2009) and appeal to an abstract alternative (Buccola et al. 2020; Charlow 2019). This latter point provides a challenge for theories of alternative generation based on structural replacements and deletions (Katzir 2007). \n \nEARLY ACCESS","PeriodicalId":45550,"journal":{"name":"Semantics & Pragmatics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1000,"publicationDate":"2020-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"3","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Semantics & Pragmatics","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.13.15","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 3
Abstract
This paper investigates the properties of similative plurals, focusing on m-reduplication in Persian and -toka and -tari in Japanese. Although these expressions are associated with what I refer to as a non-homogeneous plural inference in upward-entailing contexts, I demonstrate that this inference is not an entailment of sentences with these morphemes, but is merely implicated, much like the multiplicity condition associated with English bare plurals (Krifka 2004; Spector 2007; Zweig (2009); de Swart & Farkas 2010). I propose an analysis of similative plurals as mereological mixtures of a set with a set of contextually similar objects, and derive the non-homogeneous plural reading via scalar implicature. I demonstrate that deriving this implicature requires both the calculation of implicature at a subsentential level (Chierchia 2004; Chierchia 2006; Zweig 2009) and appeal to an abstract alternative (Buccola et al. 2020; Charlow 2019). This latter point provides a challenge for theories of alternative generation based on structural replacements and deletions (Katzir 2007).
EARLY ACCESS