Double plural marking and the building blocks of nominals

Abstract

In this paper, I will discuss double plural marking found in various language mixing pairs such as Ewe English, Hiaki Spanish, Bantu English, Bantu French and Greek Turkish. I will contrast this double marking, a case of multiple exponence, to better studied cases of double marking of plurality in languages such as Amharic and Breton. I will argue that double marking can be treated uniformly as an instance of split plurality and offer an analysis within the framework of Distributed Morphology. This in turn means that there is no such thing as multiple exponence of grammatical plurality. I will then discuss why the plural, as opposed to other numbers, and why language mixing favor doubling. I will argue that double marking is favored in the context of the plural as plurality is manifold, being associated with two semantic primitives in the universal functional spine. Language mixing situations have been argued to show analyticity and thus double marking is favored in those.

Keywords

• plural
• lexical number
• multiple exponence
• language mixing
• analyticity
• fusion