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<div>Hi all.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>My recollection is that Alana's description is consistent with
what I have seen elsewhere: a variety of assertions about languages
with dual as a morphological category, its use is not always
obligatory and that to greater or lesser degrees the plural can be
used to refer to a group of two. The reference I would check first is
Greville Corbett's book<i> Number</i> from CUP, which has an extremely
thorough description of what kinds of number systems are attested. I
had planned to check this before posting, but my copy is lent
out.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>The Surrey Morphology Group has produced quite a lot of
accessible research bearing on a number of the recent postings. Check
out:<font face="Lucida Grande" size="+1" color="#000000">
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/LIS/SMG/</font> Their work on Syncretism
is important for previous discussions, and there is a user-friendly
searchable database of Syncretism on-line at the above website. The
following paper in particular makes the case that some of the
"diagonal" syncretisms (say, neuter plural nominative =
masculine singular genitive) we try to explain in Indo-European occur
only in Indo-European, a result that questions just how much
syncretism should fall out of the system rather than being listed as
homophony / language particular historical accidents.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><font color="#000000">Baerman, Matthew, Dunstan Brown &
Grenville Corbett. 2001. 'Case syncretism in and out of
Indo-European', in<i> Parasession of Chicago Linguistics
Society</i>.</font></div>
<div><br></div>
<div>-Jonathan</div>
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<div><br></div>
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<div>_______________________<br>
Jonathan David Bobaljik<br>
University of Connecticut<br>
Department of Linguistics, Unit 1145<br>
337 Mansfield Road<br>
Storrs, CT 06269-1145<br>
USA<br>
<br>
tel: (860) 486-0153<br>
fax: (860) 486-0197<br>
<br>
http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/</div>
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