LING Colloquium: Yağmur Sağ (Harvard)

Number Marking, (Singular) Kind Reference, and Pseudo-incorporation

Abstract: Turkish, similar to English, distinguishes between morphologically unmarked and plural forms of nouns (kitap 'book';kitap+lar 'book+s'). While English unmarked nouns are easily identified as singular terms, Turkish unmarked nouns convey number neutral interpretations in certain cases and strictly singular interpretations in others.  For that reason, Turkish is advertised as one of the few languages where morphologically unmarked nouns are also semantically unmarked with a number neutral denotation, and morphologically marked plurals are also semantically marked with a strictly plural denotation. However,  I argue that Turkish nominal semantics aligns with English and many other languages in an asymmetrical correlation, designating unmarked nouns as semantically singular and plurals as number neutral. Drawing on insights from Chierchia (1998) and Dayal (2004), I claim that the apparent number neutrality of unmarked nouns stems from singular kind reference, which is grammatically singular but conceptually plural in nature. I demonstrate that singular kind reference has a broader application in Turkish, extending to phenomena, including pseudo-incorporation (kitap oku- 'book read'). While similar effects are also observed in English with so-called weak definites (read the newspaper), the extensive use of singular kind terms in Turkish creates the illusion that Turkish and English nominal semantics are fundamentally different when, in fact, they only vary in distribution. In this talk, I will discuss Turkish number marking semantics, with a primary focus on singular kind reference and pseudo-incorporation. Analyzing its interaction with lexical aspect in Turkish, my ongoing study posits pseudo-incorporation as an event-kind level argumentation process, where a verb denoting an event kind exclusively pairs with a singular kind argument to establish the taxonomy of event kinds. (cf. van Geenhoven 1998, Chung & Ladusaw 2004, Dayal 2011, Gehrke & McNally 2011, Sağ 2018, 2022 and Luo 2022, a.o.).