associative plurals - summary

[Edith A Moravcsik]

On August 15, I posted a request for information about languages that do
or do not have the associative plural construction (ex: Japanese
Tanaka-tachi "Tanaka-PLU" 'Tanaka and his family or friends or
associates'). The query was on behalf of Mikhail Daniel and myself.

In response, I have received single or multiple messages from 26
colleagues. Most of them came to my own e-mail address rather than to
LINGTYP and although I acknowledged them individually, I wish to thank
once again to all of you who responded:

   Daniel Abondolo
   Alexandra Aikhenvald
   Gontzal Aldai
   Helma van den Berg
   Winfried Boeder
   Ruth Brend
   Robert Carlson
   Mark Donohue
   Nick Enfield
   Jan Terje Faarlund
   Alex Francois
   James Gair
   Gideon Goldenberg
   Martin Haase
   Austin Hale
   Laszlo Honti
   Paul Hopper
   Francis Katamba
   Roger Lass
   Stephen Matthews
   Geoffrey Nathan
   Enrique Palancar
   Paolo Ramat
   Wolfgang Schulze
   Ruth Singer
   Maria Cecilia Stroppa

The responses offered examples and analyses of the associative plural and
of related constructions in the following languages (? indicates the
analysis is not yet complete):

Abkhaz
Afrikaans
Amharic
Basque
Burushaski ?
Cantonese
Desano (and other East-Tucanoan languages)
English (dialectal: US Mid-West, Texas, Canada, East
         Scotland, NE England)
Georgian (Old)
Hunzib ?
Jamaican Creole
Kriol (the Australian contact language)
Kubachi
Lao
Luganda
Mangarrayi ?
Mwotlap
Newari
Ngiyambaa
Nivkh
Old Norse
Norwegian
Rutul
Sinhala
Supyire
Tabasaran
Tariana
Tukang Besi ?

Multi-word expressions with the associative plural meaning have also been
cited from French ("Paul et les siens") and Italian ("Paolo e i soi").

A language that was reported NOT to have associative plurals is Otomi.

One of our goals is to establish the crosslinguistic distribution of
associative plurals. In order to be able to do that, we need to know both
about languages that do have the construction and about languages that do
not. While we continue to be interested in languages that have associative
plurals, at present our most crying need is to find languages that do not
have it.

Edith Moravcsik



   ************************************************************************
			 Edith A. Moravcsik
			 Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics
			 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
		         Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413
                         USA

			 E-mail: edith at uwm.edu
		         Telephone: (414) 229-6794 /office/
				    (414) 332-0141 /home/
		         Fax: (414) 229-2741