Speaker: Vsevolod Masliukov (MIT)
Title: Two is Many: Dual Neutralization and Markedness
Time: Thursday, November 5th, 5pm – 6pm
Location: 32-D769
Abstract: This talk looks at a class of neutralizations in which the dual is replaced by the plural whenever two bundles of phi-features are spelled out within a single morphological word. I adopt a bivalent decomposition of number into [±singular] and [±augmented] (Harbour 2011) and argue that these patterns arise from postsyntactic Impoverishment of the marked [–augmented] value, which leaves an underspecified plural exponent to surface on semantic duals.
The core case comes from my fieldwork on Kazym Khanty (Uralic). There, possessed duals may take plural morphology while keeping both dual meaning and dual verb agreement. Crucially, this is possible only with possessors that rank high on a combined person–number markedness hierarchy. This supports Nevins’s (2011) view that marked values both trigger Impoverishment and are its targets.
Parallel data from Mehri, Third Mesa Hopi, Warlpiri and Nimboran suggest a broader generalization: two local phi-bundles are themselves a marked configuration, which can be resolved in different ways.