On August 29th, Omri Doron successfully and eloquently defended his dissertation, titled Another look at the typology of number: the mystery of the missing singular! Congratulations, Omri!! You can read the abstract below:
The typology of nominal number marking features, in addition to languages like English, in which all nouns in argument position are singular or plural, languages in which nouns can appear in the general number form (Andrzejewsky, 1960) – a form which is semantically unspecified for number. In my dissertation, I discuss two challenges that these languages pose to theories that assume that plural nouns are born inclusive (containing both atomic and plural individuals), and get their multiplicity inferences from competition with their singular alternative. First, languages like Bayso (Cushitic, East Africa), in which nouns come in either the singular, the plural or the general form, raise the question of why the plural form gives rise to multiplicity inferences but the general form does not. Second, languages like Indonesian, in which nouns seem to come only in the plural and the general form, raise the additional question of how multiplicity inferences arise from the plural form in the lack of a singular alternative to compete with. I propose a solution for these two problems, and show that it provides us with a parsimonious account of the typological picture, and naturally exntends to the pattern of plural marking on wh-words in languages like Spanish (Maldonado 2020, Elliott et al. 2022, Alonso-Ovalle & Rouillard 2023).
Here are photos of Omri and three members in his committee (from left to right: Danny, Kai, Omri and Viola). In addition, Martin joined the defense via Zoom:
