associative plurals

Fri Aug 31 06:01:48 UTC 2001

On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, Colin P Masica wrote:
> Could the phenomenon of "echo-word formation", cited by Emeneau 1956 as
> characteristic of the South Asian linguistic area (and mentioned earlier by
> Bloch, who lumps it together with other phenomena involving reduplication
> and word-pairings) be brought under this "associative plural" rubric? It

Yes, these phenomona are related. For some discussion of this point,
see:

Bickel, B. & J. Nichols, 2001. Inflectional Morphology. Ms., U.C. Berkeley
(= Draft version of a chapter for the new edition of Shopen's Language
Typology and Syntactic Descriptions)

The paper is available on the web at

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~autotyp/download

        - Balthasar.

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Balthasar Bickel
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