Re: Number

Aidan Grey wrote:

> Ran teithan Jeff:
> > I hope you're kidding -- that is not at all how I
> > understand "distributive"
> > and "collective". To me, "distributive" is like
> > mathematical distributive
> > and "collective" means that the set of entities is
> > treated like an entity
> > itself.
>
>   Nope, he's not kidding. And it gets weirder still,
> like in my example above. Remember that every
> occupation will have its unique uses of certain terms.
> A psychologist will have a very different
> understanding of distributive than a mathematician!
Well, no, actually the mathematical senses of the term "collective" and
"distributive" *are* used in linguistics--perhaps not with reference to
number, but certainly with reference to quantification over individuals and
events.  Consider a sentence like "Everybody went to the village".  This is
ambiguous:  It could mean that everybody went to the village together (a
single event).  That's the collective construal.  Or it could mean that
different groups of one or more people went to the village at different
times (multiple events).  In the latter case, we say that the events of
going to the village are distributed among the individuals in the set
denoted by "everybody".

I wouldn't be surprised if some language somewhere distinguished the
collective and distributive interpretations grammatically--either by using
different quantifiers (my conlang Tokana does this), or perhaps by using
different plural markers.  Maybe some or all of the languages which Marcus
was referring to actually work like this.  Then there are languages which
allow you to pluralise the verb itself to indicate multiple events; in such
languages, "Everybody went to the village" could be disambiguated by just
looking at the number marking on the verb.

Matt.

Replies