The Semantics of Number in Arabic

Abstract

No abstract.

Number and Gender Convergence: The Arabic Plurative

“…In parallel, Arabic has another mode for expressing unities, or unitization, namely the functional mode of Gender. The feminine suffix -at, identified in the literature as a singulative, plays an individuative role and acts as a classifier, as Greenberg (1972) and others have observed (Ojeda 1992;Fassi Fehri 2003-04, passim;Zabbal 2002-05;Mathieu 2012). Feminine gender morphology is then seen as an alternative mode of expression to the semi-functional head in the analytic pseudo-partitive constructions analysed above, and at the same time to the classifier in South Asian languages.…”

“…See also Unterbeck (2000). The relevance of atomicity has been argued by many significant contributions in the semantics of Number, following the lead of Link (1983), including Krifka (1989), Landman (1989), Chierchia (1998), Ojeda (1992Ojeda ( , 1998Ojeda ( -2005, Rothstein 15. A join semilattice (or upper) is a partially ordered set that has a join for any nonempty finite subset.…”

“…Other theories of groups such as Ojeda (1992Ojeda ( , 2005 conceive of groups as restrictions of pluralities (see also Arsenijević 2016-8). Ojeda takes group to be an 'endomorphic image' of a subset of the universe of discourse.…”

“…Its base is a partially individuated or (weakly) atomized (starting as a kind 'collective'), then unitization is brought out by the classifier, 'refining' the denotation of its 'collective' base to only the lower part of the semi-lattice, that is, to atoms. Singulative is then a refining or restricting process (Ojeda 1992(Ojeda , 2005Grimm 2012), which inputs a kind (or general) individual collective, and outputs only the set of single atoms, or more precisely units. In Ojeda (2005), modification in terms of size and shape is mentioned as a known property of count nouns (and not of mass).…”

An Optimality Theoretic Analysis of Broken Plurals in Muscat Arabic

“…15 This should not be interpreted as "one singular may have different plurals" although it has been claimed in (Ojeda 1992 The singular forms (6a.) and (6b.)…”