A morphosyntactic account of verbal number in Mupun
Irene Amato
December 2018 

In this paper, I argue that verbal number is Agree with either a DP (resulting in participant number reading) or an Adverbial Phrase (giving rise to an event number interpretation). Several facts support this claim: mismatches between the number features on the verb and on its argument, the role of the external argument for verbal number distinctions, the ambiguity between the two functions (participant plurality/event plurality), and the morphological productivity of the category. The analysis considers data from two Chadic languages, Mupun and Mwaghavul, and is couched in Minimalist Syntax and Distributed Morphology.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008386 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of the 26th Conference of the Student Organization of Linguistics in Europe, eds. A. van Alem, A. Ionova and C. Pots, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, 20-43.
keywords:	verbal number, allomorphy, interaction/satisfaction, agree, chadic languages, morphology, syntax
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