THE SEMANTICS OF PLURALITY IN BURMESE

Abstract

I investigate the semantics of Burmese plural morphemes, twe/dwe, myà, and tó/dó. In the literature, plural expressions are often classified by whether their referent consists of atoms that are homogeneous or non-homogeneous. I argue that this insufficient in capturing the differences observed amongst plural expressions in Burmese. I suggest that a productive way to classify plurals is in terms of extendedness: whether the referents of plural expressions can include atoms that do not satisfy the relevant description of the overt nominal(s) in the expression. I thus report that plurals formed with twe/dwe and myà are consistently non-extending, and plurals formed with tó/dó are extending. I further report that the associative plural tó/dó has an internal plural use, where the multiplicity inference is satisfied internally by the referents named in the expression. I propose that the contribution of tó/dó is an at-issue post-supposition evaluated after the primary assertions of the sentence.