Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Doctoral Dissertations

Theses/Dissertations

2023

Associative plurals

Articles 1 - 1 of 1

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Associative Plurals, Sherry Hucklebridge Nov 2023

Associative Plurals, Sherry Hucklebridge

Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of this dissertation is to present an analysis of associative plurals in Japanese, Turkish, and Armenian that captures their associative interpretation along with a series of cross-linguistically consistent behaviours that do not seem to stem directly from these special meanings. For associative plurals, group affiliation is established through spatio-temporal or conceptual contiguity rather than a shared description (Moravcsik 2003). Approaches to English-like additive plurality are unable to capture associative plurals because they predict a plurality based on similarity, where every element of a plural noun is either an element of the corresponding singular or a concatenation of those …