Associative Plurals

[Edith A Moravcsik]

Many thanks to Colin Masica for bringing up the question of echo-word
formations and more generally, of etc.-constructions whether expressed as
echo-words or in some other way; and also for the references on this
topic.

Echo-words are clearly related to what Mikhail Daniel and I call
"associative plurals": in both instances, the inferred members of the
plural set are understood as similar to the entity mentioned. The
difference is that in the associative plural construction, the entity
mentioned is a unique individual while in etc.-constructions refers to
a kind of thing.

The two constructions are also different in distribution and in how they
are formed. Languages may or may not have both; and if a language
has both, I do not recall examples where the same marking is used both for
associative plurals and for etc.-constructions.

Edith Moravcsik



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

			 E-mail: edith at uwm.edu
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