Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

LF Reading Group 10/12 - Keely New (MIT)

We’re excited to welcome Keely at the first LFRG of the semester! The meeting will be in person, but we’ll set up OWL for people in the department who want to attend virtually.

Zoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/94298987190​
Speaker: Keely New (MIT)
Time: Wednesday 10/12, 1-2pm
In-person location: 32-D461

Title: Associative plurals and the plural pronoun construction

Abstract: In Burmese, a conjunction of associative plural DPs has an available reading where the named individuals in the conjunction internally satisfy the plural requirement. I call this the internal plural reading. The internal plural reading is reminiscent of what has been called the plural pronoun construction in Russian, Greek etc. In this talk, I present a post-suppositional semantics for Burmese associative plurals. In a nutshell, I propose that the named individuals in a conjunction of associative plurals can satisfy each other’s plural requirement if the associative plural has a meaning that is post-suppositional. I discuss the extent to which this post-suppositional analysis can be extended to the PPC, particularly in light of the empirical landscape regarding the availability of PPC and internal plural reading across and within languages.​