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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. 155–190

Structure of plural pronoun constructions

| Boğaziçi University
| Boğaziçi University

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
  • 3.The case of correlative coordinators
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 July 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.215.06tur
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