No updates today.... feeling so lazy to write down the gist of todays class on (In)definites and Genericity!! Roughly todays class was about how is the notion of plurality concieved in natural language. In simple terms, plurality is a set denoting concept. If we have 2 objects a & b, the plural of a & b is concieved as {a, b, a+b}. But there are some deviations from this definition, for example: in Hindi
"main kitab kharidti hu", this sentence doesnot mean I buy only one book, though the head Noun is in singular form. Same kind of example is "maine bacche ko kitab di" (not necessary one book). But when we specify with a numeral like "maine do kitaben kharidi", then number morphology is reflected on the head. If we consider the first sentence, its interpretation is generic, its a general statement. Again lets look at some English sentences: "he is a house painter" or "he is stamp collector" it doesnot mean he paints only one house or collects only one stamp, but its not written as houses painter or so. These kinds of compound nouns also denote a more complex notion of plurality.
Another interesting example to look into is Mass nouns, it seems they are inherently plural (Inherent Plural Hypothesis, Chierchia 1998), they need some measure words to count them, like 3 sacks of rice or 6 glasses of milk. But we can have examples where mass nouns can directly be counted by a numeral like "three beers" or "four teas please". So many aspects to look into. Then Prof Dayal explained some theory of Atom, Taxonomy, Kind interpretation etc. which I'll write later on, have to read the handout and class notes again, carefully...
Meanwhile, trying to draw the tree structure of Assamese DP, though it will change for sure. The ?P, I guess is the locus of specificity, have no idea about naming this projection. Lets see...
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