Margit Bowler (University of Manchester) colloquium

This in-progress work examines a pervasive pattern of translational polysemy that has been virtually unattested in the theoretical literature (with the exception of Matthewson 2009 and Faller & Hastings 2008). By “translational” polysemy, we mean that the items we study are translated into English with a disanaphoric (Mantenuto 2020) meaning ‘other; different’ or a partitive existential quantifier meaning ‘some of’. The pattern is found at least in languages of Australia, Papua New Guinea, Austronesia, Americas, and Eurasia (Evans 1995; Matthewson 2009; Hellwig 2019, a.m.o.). We primarily discuss one representative item in Warlpiri (Pama-Nyungan, Australia), -kari, for which we have the most data. In addition to its disanaphoric and partitive uses, -kari can be translated as an indefinite existential ‘some’ and occur in “paired” constructions of the form A-kari… A’-kari.  All uses of -kari are united in that they are analysed with reference to complement sets, which forms the core of our analysis of the Warlpiri data. We propose that -kari is an existential quantifier with a disanaphoric postsupposition (building on Brasoveanu & Szabolcsi 2013). We then show how this analysis extends to cover the variation of this polysemy in other languages. This research contributes to our cross-linguistic understanding of partitivity and (broadly) alternatives and their pragmatic status, and offers further evidence for postsuppositions.