Ginny Dawson will deliver an in-person colloquium. The title and abstract are below.
Nouns in classifier and non-classifier languages can mean the same thing: Evidence from Tiwa
A longstanding question in formal semantics concerns the extent to which basic noun meanings vary across languages. That languages differ significantly in whether or not they have numeral classifiers and (obligatory) number marking has led some researchers to propose a significant degree of variation (e.g. Chierchia 1998). In this talk, I examine the behavior of nouns in Tiwa, a Tibeto-Burman language of India, arguing that despite having the properties of a typical classifier language, nouns can and should be analyzed as (i) predicative, and (ii) showing a mass/count distinction, just as in English. I argue that the differences between languages like Tiwa and English are largely morphosyntactic: Tiwa and English differ in their inventory of number features and in when they project a number phrase; they also differ in whether they have overt morphology marking whether a numeral is predicative or not. What seem like major differences between the two languages, then, do not reflect fundamental differences in how noun meaning is encoded. I end by looking at the typological picture more broadly, examining the ways languages can differ based on the dimensions of variation I identify.
