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
Highlights
This paper investigates the properties of similative plurals, focusing on mreduplication in Persian and -toka and -tari in Japanese
Persian1 possesses a type of full root reduplication, termed m-reduplication in other languages with a similar construction, and further termed a similative plural by Armoskaite & Kutlu (2013), which applies to nouns to create a non-homogeneous plural: that is, the plurality is understood to include objects with a property distinct from that of the overtly mentioned object (Nakanishi & Tomioka 2004). (1), for instance, is judged true if and only if Mohsen read at least one book, as well as something else similar to a book in the context, such as a magazine
CONTEXT: Speaker walks into unknown house and notices toys littering the floor There are children in this house. All of this goes to show that the non-homogeneous plural inference observed in Persian m-reduplication is much like the multiplicity inference associated with English bare plurals: it is sensitive to the monotonicity of the semantic environment it is in, and vanishes in more global pragmatic contexts establishing speaker ignorance, even in semantic contexts in which the inference would otherwise be expected to arise
Summary
Persian possesses a type of full root reduplication, termed m-reduplication in other languages with a similar construction, and further termed a similative plural by Armoskaite & Kutlu (2013), which applies to nouns to create a non-homogeneous plural: that is, the plurality is understood to include objects with a property distinct from that of the overtly mentioned object (Nakanishi & Tomioka 2004). (1), for instance, is judged true if and only if Mohsen read at least one book, as well as something else similar to a book in the context, such as a magazine. It appears reasonable to treat NPs involving m-reduplication as involving reference to non-homogeneous plural entities; for example, a noun like ketâb metâb would denote a set of sum individuals such that each individual contains at least one book as a part, as well as at least one thing similar to a book in the context, and nothing else, as in (9), where ‘b’ represents an individual book, ‘m’ represents an individual magazine, and ‘c’ represents an individual comic book. This analysis is straightforward, I will provide evidence that things are not as simple as they seem
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