The morphosemantics of incremental plurality

Robert Henderson (University of Arizona)

An areal feature of indigenous languages of the Southwest United States and Northwest Mexico are morphologically complex systems of plura(actiona)lity. In particular, there are multiple instances of unrelated languages implementing scale-based plura(actiona)lity—that is, there is no one-to-one mapping between exponents and plural meanings (e.g., Seri (Baerman 2016), Hualapai (Baerman 2019), Salinan (Baerman 2024), etc.). Instead, these langauages have a list of plural meanings ordered by some notion of “more plural” (call it <ₛ for semantic order), along with a list of exponents ordered by some morphosyntactically defined order (call it <ₘ for morphological order). Paradigms are well-formed as long as these orders are in scale alignment. More precisely, α <ₘ β iff ⟦α⟧ <ₛ ⟦β⟧.

Such systems immediately generate three questions, First, how do we define the morphological order <ₘ? It could be that some forms are longer than other forms, it could be that some forms are morphologically complex than other forms, it could be by fiat, etc. Second, how do we define the semantic order <ₛ? It could be by entailment, it could be complexity of features (defined in various ways), etc. Finally, and most challenging, what kind of theory of the morphosemantic interface could generate scale-based morphological systems? While we will consider issues for the third question, the main goal of this work is to present advances on the first two questions for the Seri and Hualapai languages, which we will see, pose serious challenges on their own.

We first provide descriptive advances about the morphology of these languages. We present a new generalization about the order <ₘ in Seri, showing that it is partially definable via morphological complexity–essentially, complex plural forms are higher on <ₘ than their parts. Major morphological puzzles still exist–most glaringly, and related to the third question concerning the morphosemantic interface, we cannot assign a compositional meaning to these complex forms and their parts. That said, our proposal cover 50% of the 30-40 some odd verbal agreement forms we find in Seri. This is a major advance because <ₘ has been defined by fiat in previous literature. We also refine the morphological order for Hualapai as presented in Baerman 2019. We take seriously his idea that the order has the algebraic structure of addition, and in doing so, show that certain forms must be reanalyzed (and should be for independent reasons).

Second, we provide the first formal semantic account of the order <ₛ in both Seri and Hualapai. In Hualapai the situation is fairly straightforward. We propose a degree-based account where verbs that are “more plural” have more (i.e., a higher degree of) participants. What is interesting is that this notion doesn’t track entailment, which shows that the relevant morphology is tracking some unique, language-specific order. The situation in Seri is much more complex. Building off of ideas of Rothstein (2010), who argues that the context provides the resources necessary for counting, we show that we can order plural verb meanings through the kinds of demands these forms make on the context (so that their truth-conditions can be computed). The analysis is an important advance because, as we will show, simple notions of semantic order like entailment or cardinality (as in Hualapai), fail in the face of the Seri data. We need a richer theory of definedness conditions that we can order, which our extension of the Rothestein framework provides.