Dual v. Plural, Syncretism references

[Jonathan David Bobaljik]

Hi all.

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 Number 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.

The Surrey Morphology Group has produced quite a lot of accessible
research bearing on a number of the recent postings. Check out:
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/LIS/SMG/  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.

Baerman, Matthew, Dunstan Brown & Grenville Corbett. 2001. 'Case
syncretism in and out of Indo-European', in Parasession of Chicago
Linguistics Society.

-Jonathan


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Jonathan David Bobaljik
University of Connecticut
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