Speaker: Margaret Wang (MIT)
Title: Variable preservation of honorificity after repluralization: a diachronic typology
Time: Wednesday, November 13th, 5pm – 6pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: Given the cross-linguistically widespread recruitment of plural for politeness, repluralization is also widespread. This talk aims to address two puzzles about repluralization. First, given that there exist other proxies for politeness (person, inclusivity), why is repluralization the only historical innovation that is attested? I will argue that number is the only grammatical proxy with the relevant resources. Second, repluralization may yield either general-purpose plurals or stratified” plurals. I argue that what derives these two different pathways is the variable ranking of two OT constraints that operate on morphological paradigms, Analyticity and Syncretize-in-Plural. This is a practice talk for a diachronic semantics conference, all comments are welcome.