Dual v. Plural, Syncretism references

[Daniel L. Everett]

Grev's group is indeed doing some very valuable work. One of the 
distinctions that emerge from studies of agreement, not necessarily 
from the Surrey Group, though, is that pragmatic agreement and 
syntactic agreement are not the same. So, for example, "The sheriff has 
gone wild. She just shot the deputy." The gender on "she" is 
pragmatically determined. Similar things happen with number, e.g. "If 
anyone wants a job, they should apply", where 'they' is pragmatically 
singular and morphosyntactically plural (it is also a loan word, so 
perhaps that is related to its weird usages). In any case, such 
examples and the contrast in agreement types  mean that the use of 
plural to refer to dual in  texts is not necessarily relevant to formal 
feature matching. One has to first sort out the agreement types in a 
given language, their uses, discourse structure, and, even, the culture 
of reference.

-- Dan


On Monday, Mar 1, 2004, at 17:13 Europe/London, Jonathan David Bobaljik 
wrote:

>
> 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
------------------------------------------

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

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