morphosyntactic feature geometries

[Daniel L. Everett]

On Saturday, Feb 28, 2004, at 23:26 Europe/London, Alana Johns wrote:

> Regarding the recent discussion of the dual and its interpretation, I
> thought I would mention something I know but have not investigated
> fully. This is that in at least one dialect of Inuktitut which is known
> to have a dual, I have a story from a monolingual speaker where the
> topic of the story is a couple (isolated), and they are consistently
> referred to by the plural. It is possible that other dialects (e.g.
> Labrador Inuttut) would not allow this so it has been on my agenda for
> some time to investigate this more thoroughly. Alana

Alana,

I think that number can often be used for different illocutionary
effects (e.g. the obvious 'imperial we'). Thus its meaning is perhaps
not always literal. Has anyone done a detailed study of number in
Inuttut discourse?

Dan

------------------------------------------

Daniel L. Everett
Professor of Phonetics & Phonology
Postgraduate Programme Director
Department of Linguistics
The University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester, UK M13 9PL
http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de
Fax: 44-161-275-3187
Office: 44-161-275-3158