Associative plurals

[David Tuggy]

The Russian examples sound like what I was looking directly for: plural 
morphology of some sort used with associative meaning. Plus the added 
beauty of lack of overt plural affixation, with the plurality only 
showing up in “agreement”. Thanks!

—David T

On 4/4/2011 11:01 PM, Yokoyama, Olga wrote:
> In Japanese, you can add them to kinship terms as well (o-kaa-san-tachi 'mother et al'). In the 19th century Russian peasant letters (by speakers of North Russian dialect)) I have found a similar phenomenon with a subject personal name in sg but with pl verb agreement (e.g. John were, meaning 'John and wife were').
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> Olga T. Yokoyama
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