| dc.description.abstract | Many languages use plural pronouns to address (and refer to) single individuals with politeness or honorification. In some languages, these plurals of politeness (PoPs) show mixed agreement, triggering plural agreement on some agreement targets and singular on others. In this dissertation, I use PoPs to investigate the internal structure of DPs, focusing on how number features are represented within them.
Starting first with pronominal DPs, I adopt the view that these contain two phrases: (i) a noun phrase (NP) headed by a silent noun (Postal 1966 and subsequent work), and (ii) an index phrase (idxP), realized by the pronoun, which occupies the specifier of the DP and introduces a referential index (Jenks 2022; see also Choi 2014, Giusti 2015). My novel claim is that both the NP and the idxP bear their own number features. In most cases, this is not detectable because the number features of the NP and idxP match. I argue, however, that this is not the case for PoPs, which allows us to see that these two number features are in fact distinct. Specifically, I show that the agreement patterns of PoPs are best accounted for by treating them as consisting of a plural idxP with a singular NP (i.e., a plural pronoun with a silent singular noun). This analysis not only derives the mixed agreement of PoPs seen in some languages, but also explains certain cross-linguistic restrictions on the distribution of singular agreement with them.
I also extend this analysis to account for nominal PoPs, a type of nominal DP found in a subset of languages with pronominal PoPs. These nominal PoPs have the same semantics and the same agreement patterns as their pronominal counterparts, but crucially, the morphology on the noun in nominal PoPs is singular and not plural. I argue that these similarities and differences can be explained by positing that idxPs are present in nominal DPs as well, but are not realized overtly. This analysis of nominal PoPs is shown to also be able to account for the DP-internal concord patterns seen with them. | |
