morphosyntactic feature geometries

[Martha McGinnis]

Hi Alana,

>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.

This IS intriguing!  It certainly does suggest that the plural can be
used for sets of two.  Any idea why the speaker used the plural
rather than the dual? Makes me wonder if the dual is really used to
contrast with the plural -- then once it's been established that
they're an isolated couple, there'd be no need for the dual.  Anyway,
it suggests that the plural isn't [-Minimal]... unless the
interpretation of "Minimal" is highly context-dependent.

Cheers,
Martha
--
mcginnis at ucalgary.ca