A post-suppositional account of associative plurals in Burmese

Abstract

I investigate the interpretation of the associative plural tó/dó in Colloquial Burmese based on original fieldwork. I report that in a conjunction of associative plurals, there is an available reading where the named individuals in the conjunction internally satisfy the plural requirement. I call this the internal plural reading, a reading which has not been previously observed in the literature. I propose that the named individuals in a conjunction of associative plurals can satisfy each other's plural requirement if the Burmese associative plural has a meaning that ixs post-suppositional. The proposal is inspired by Brasoveanu & Szabolcsi 2013's treatment of conjunctions of additive phrases in some languages, but our proposals crucially differ in that associative plurals contribute assertive meaning rather than not-at-issue meaning.