In:Morphological Complexity within and across Boundaries: In honour of Aslı Göksel
Edited by Aslı Gürer, Dilek Uygun-Gökmen and Balkız Öztürk
[Studies in Language Companion Series 215] 2020
► pp. 155–189
Structure of plural pronoun constructions
Published online: 15 July 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.215.06tur
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.215.06tur
Abstract
In Turkish plural pronoun constructions, plural pronouns can receive a singular interpretation, which constitutes a challenge for semantic compositionality. The question is whether this is due to the internal structure of plural pronouns, or whether the issue arises as a byproduct of the syntactic configuration. Earlier accounts tend to blame the problem on the syntax/semantics of plural pronouns. Nevertheless, the fact that it exclusively arises in plural pronoun constructions suggests to the contrary. This study adopts a φP account of Number, and proposes that inclusive plural pronouns result from the mechanism by which the coordinated DP acquires its φ-features. This is demonstrated to explain a number of puzzling properties of plural pronoun constructions that are otherwise left unaccounted for.
Keywords: plural pronoun constructions, phi-features, inclusive, exclusive, comitative, coordination
Article outline
- 0.Introduction
- 1.Earlier analyses
- 1.1The saturation account
- 1.2.Other accounts
- 1.3Further problems with earlier accounts
- 1.3.1IPPCs with regular coordinators
- 1.3.2IPPCs with proper nouns
- 1.3.3Ambiguity
- 1.3.4Semantics of plural pronouns
- 1.3.5Crosslinguistic variation
- 2.A φ-acquisition model
- 2.1Background assumptions
- 2.1.1Φ-features
- 2.1.2Comitative coordination
- 2.1.3Case
- 2.2Structure of PPCs
- 2.3Other properties of PPCs
- 2.4Further evidence
- 2.1Background assumptions
- 3.The case of correlative coordinators
- 4.Conclusion
Notes References
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