Doctoral Dissertation Research: The grammar of number, countability and measurement

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

The sentence 'Max wrote books' can only signify that there are two or more books that Max wrote. The presence of the marker '-s' on 'book' seems to induce a non-singular interpretation. However, 'Max didn’t write books' signifies that there is not even one book that Max wrote. Evidently, plural nouns such as 'books' can sometimes refer to a plurality (i.e., 2 or more) or a singleton (i.e., 1). When are such mismatches between the form of a noun and its meaning possible? In some languages, unlike in English, there is optional plural marking on nouns; in those languages, even if the plural marker is absent, the noun may freely apply to either singulars or plurals. This doctoral dissertation project investigates an understudied language variety that exhibits this particular property, using interviews with speakers and the recording and transcription of narratives as the basis for an analysis of the properties of the linguistic expression of number in this language and cross-linguistically. This project also contributes to the training and diversification of the next generation of language researchers, inviting undergraduate students from under­represented groups in STEM to participate in scientific research with an emphasis on developing both academic and industry-­relevant skills related to data collection techniques, data analysis, project management, and project presentation. This project documents and analyzes linguistic data from a language that marks the grammatical distinction between singular and plural rather like English, at a first pass level of description: singular nouns are unmarked and plural nouns are marked. However, there is an important difference: unmarked nouns that apply to inanimate things are interpreted as number neutral (i.e., can be understood to apply to one thing, or to more than one) while unmarked animate nouns, in contrast, are strictly singular, so only plural marked expressions apply to pluralities of two or more. The same pattern is found when the nouns combine with measure expressions like 'many' which require that the noun apply to pluralities, but it is not found when the noun is modified by a numeral like 'seventeen'. Numerals in this language require that the noun they modify be unmarked and understood to be semantically singular. This project connects these patterns of number marking to the 'mass-count' distinction, and the language of measurement and counting. The project thereby connects different research traditions and grows the field's collective understanding of how number and related categories are expressed cross-linguistically, to reveal deep properties of human language and cognition. The research therefore informs fields adjacent to syntax and semantics wherein notions of number and countability play an important role, including philosophy, language acquisition, and cognitive psychology. Within linguistics, this work contributes to best methodological practices for theoretically-driven fieldwork concerned with eliciting morpho-syntactic and semantic data. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.