Associative plural as indexical category

Language Sciences xxx (xxxx) xxx

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Associative plural as indexical category Michael Daniel Linguistic Convergence Laboratory, School of Linguistics (HSE University, Moscow), 21/4 (b. 1), room B-421. Staraja Basmannaja ul., Moscow, Russia

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 24 October 2017 Received in revised form 29 October 2019 Accepted 14 November 2019 Available online xxx

The Animacy Hierarchy was introduced as a cross-grammatical factor which governs, in different languages, widespread splits of nominal categories, including case or number marking. Among othser phenomena, the Animacy Hierarchy has been invoked to describe the lexical distribution of associative plurals. In this paper I argue that associative plurals as an interpretation of nominal plurality is not licensed by the high position the respective noun holds on the Animacy Hierarchy but is a combined effect of coercion by the unique reference inherent to proper names and associative links easily recoverable for human referents. Interpretation of associative plurals relies upon activation of set relations its referent holds to other entities in the speech act situation. Associative plural is argued to be an indexical rather than a functional semantic category.* Ó 2019 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Keywords: Animacy hierarchy Associative plural Pronominal number Elliptic dual Number Indexicality

1. Introduction In this paper, I argue that the associative plural, or APL (Corbett, 2000; Moravcsik, 2003; Daniel and Moravcsik, 2013) must be defined not as a semantic functional category (‘X and his/her family’, occasionally extending to other meanings such as ‘X and his/her friends or other associates’), but as an indexical category (‘a set including X and other elements associated with X’, commonly interpreted as ‘X and his/her family’ as implied by context). This is based on a proposal that APL results from a combined effect of the semantics of the plural marker, the unique reference of the noun and availability of set relations linking the referent of the noun to other individuals. As a result, associative plural is disconnected from the position of the nominal on the Animacy Hierarchy and attributed to other properties of its (nominal’s) semantics. The data for this study mostly comes from typological observations on associative plurals (e.g. Corbett, 2000; Moravcsik, 2003) and from the author’s own research, most of which was included in the typological survey in (Daniel and Moravcsik, 2013). The latter study covers over 200 languages, including most of the presumably balanced WALS 100-sample. Because of the scarcity of the data available from grammars, we had to exclude some of the WALS languages and included many additional languages for which we had apparently conclusive data, including obtained from languages experts. The WALS

Abbreviations: 1, 2, 3, person; Abl, ablative; Acc, accusative; Add, additive (particle); Attr, attributivizer; Cn, connegative; Cvb, converb; Dat, dative; Du, dual; Emph, emhatic (particle); Erg, ergative; Fut, future; HPl, human plural (gender); Ipfv, imperfective stem; Neg, negative; NPl, non-human plural (gender); Obl, oblique; Perspl, personal plural (person agreement); Pfv, perfective stem; Pl, plural; Pl, plural; Poss, possessive; Pst, past; Ren, renarrative; Sg, singular. E-mail address: [email protected]. * The article was prepared within the framework of the HSE University Basic Research Program and funded by the Russian Academic Excellence Project ’5–100’. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers as well as to other colleagues who helped me to improve the paper, including Edith Moravcsik and Yury Lander, as well as to Valentin Gusev, Boris Nikolsky, Sergei Tatevosov and Ilya Yakobuvich for sharing their language expertise. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2019.101256 0388-0001/Ó 2019 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Please cite this article as: Daniel, M., Associative plural as indexical category, Language Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.langsci.2019.101256

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study is thus safer to be considered as based on a convenience sample. As a result, generalizations drawn from it - and used below - should be taken with a grain of salt. Languages lacking APL (37, most of them in Europe and none in Africa) are probably more common than in our sample, and the distribution of the two main types of formal marking, dedicated APL vs. APL ¼ PL (see Section 2), currently 95 vs. 104, may downplay the APL ¼ PL type. Section 2 provides a brief overview of the typology of associative plurals. Section 3 describes two alternative approaches to APLs, one functional, based on their most frequent interpretation (family relation), the other indexical, based on their reference structure (heterogeneous plural reference). Sections 4 and 5 focus on two problems arising from considering APL as a phenomenon restricted to the top segment of the Animacy Hierarchy, the fact that third person pronouns are ambiguous between homogeneous and heterogeneous plurals and the fact that the Animacy Hierarchy split otherwise only very rarely falls between human proper names and common nouns with human reference. Section 6 contains an alternative proposal, based on the fact that APL and related categories are derived from nominals with unique reference. Sections 7, 8 and 9 provide supporting evidence from occasional APLs in languages that lack them and from APL-like structures based on nouns with non-human reference. Section 10 provides an overview of the argument and the data, and Section 11 is a brief summary of the paper. 2. Associative plurals: an overview Associative plural (APL) is a nominal category that designates ‘X and associates’, where X is an individual person, a prominent member of the group, very often designated by a given name, and the associates are people associated with him and her, most often the members of his or her nuclear or extended family. Associative plurals are cross-linguistically widespread (Daniel and Moravcsik, 2013) but came into the focus of typological research relatively late, starting from the end of the 1990s (Corbett, 2000; Moravcsik, 2003; Daniel and Moravcsik, 2013; paths of grammaticalization in Sansò and Mauri, 2019; unpublished surveys in Moravcsik, 1994; Daniel, 2000; though cf. early treatment in Jespersen, 1924 and related phenomena in Delbrueck, 1893). One of the claims related to APL is that it is yet another phenomenon governed by the Animacy Hierarchy. APL are argued to be only typical of the higher part of the Animacy Hierarchy, applicable only to human nouns, and often, only to proper names. Plurals of personal pronouns are sometimes thought of as associative plurals (‘we’ as ‘I and others’, ‘you.pl’ as ‘you.sg and others’), the fact that also maps APL nicely onto the Animacy Hierarchy (Corbett, 2000; Moravcsik, 2003). In this paper, I attempt to reassess the relation between APL and the Animacy Hierarchy. I argue that the constraint to the higher part of the Hierarchy, if one does not include it into the definition of the category (APL is often defined as reference to a group of people), is motivated by unique reference of the noun (APL is often restricted to, or primarily formed from, given names). The reading ‘X and others’ is coerced on additive plural markers by the unique reference of the stem with which the regular reading of plurality does not combine. Although this correlates with a high position the APL takes on the Animacy Hierarchy, the approach is in contrast with interpretations of the Animacy Hierarchy in other typological domains. If such interpretations are provided at all, they refer to the Hierarchy as a whole and appeal to linguistic anthropo-to egocentricity or various cognitive functional expectations (see an overview in Filimonova, 2005). I argue, more specifically, that the reading ‘X and associates’ results from a natural interpretation of the coerced semantics of APL by extending the plural reference of the set to people pragmatically associated with X. APL is thus a referntial instruction issued to the addressee by the speaker rather than a grammatical meaning in the sense of semantic functional typology. This makes APL an indexical phenomenon, a category whose definitional elements refer to the speech act situation. I further argue that phenomena referentially similar to APL may be observed on other segments of the Animacy Hierarchy, whenever unique reference and/or close association between a salient element of a set (the referent of the noun) and other entities is present. One such phenomenon are forms known, in Indo-European studies, as ‘elliptic duals’ (noted already in Delbrueck, 1893 and Edgerton, 1909, and brought up again in Corbett, 2000), which are not limited to human nouns; other examples are ‘anti-associative plurals’ in (Corbett, 2000: 241–242). The correlation between APL and the Animacy Hierarchy is thus at least partly epiphenomenal, inferred by the fact that the necessary prerequisites of the former are more typical - but not constrained - to the top of the latter. Two further problematic points on the Animacy Hierarchy are discussed, kin terms (which often form APL and thus support the Hierarchy based interpretation) and third person plural pronouns (which sometimes behave as personal pronouns and thus are problematic to the Hierarchy-based interpretation). This discussion is however constrained by the limited nature of the empirical evidence available to date. Adhoc categories - the topic of the present issue - may be defined as referential categories (classes) that are construed online rather than lexically encoded (described) by a linguistic structure, be it a word or construction. (Note that here, by category one understands not a conceptual category - e.g., in our case, a set of elements - to be distinguished from linguistic categories of grammar in the traditional typological sense). I think that an adhoc category is best described as a result of implementing an instruction issued by the speaker to the addressee as to how to interpret a referring expression. The reference of the form representing an adhoc category has to be computed by the addressee largely based on speech act circumstances and on his or her knowledge of the real world. Adhoc categories in the domain of nominal quantification share a common property. They explicitly refer to only one element included in the reference of a linguistic form (or to its subset, as is often in the case of non-exhaustive co-ordination). Such adhoc categories are instructions to build a referential class by activating associations recoverable for the named element rather than lexical semantic descriptions of a class linguistically established in the addressee’s (or, for that matter, in speaker’s) mind. Please cite this article as: Daniel, M., Associative plural as indexical category, Language Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.langsci.2019.101256

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Nominal adhoc categories further split into different types. One type includes building notional classes, and may be illustrated by similatives, linguistic means of constructing meanings like ‘X and entities similar to it’ (cf. Mauri and Sansò, 2018). Similatives involve similarity-based associations; they are inherently, or at least predominantly, generic. They will not be treated in this paper at all. Another type, frame-based categories, are based on a situational frame so that naming some element(s) associated with the frame also activates other elements involved (see discussion in Barotto and Mauri, 2018). Yet another type, the one under scrutiny in this paper, includes building sets of elements by activating associations of specific referents with a named element of the set. These can be called group-based associations. Plurals of personal pronouns (for the sake of brevity, further called simply pronominal plurals) and APL are prominent members of this group of categories. Pronominal plurals are inherently referential. APL as defined above also seem to be inherently referential (Kiparsky, 2013), although there is no much empirical research on the topic. APL and pronominal plurals (as well as similatives) are referentially heterogeneous in the sense that only one referent of the set (or class) is named. This referent will be called the focal referent, or simply the focus (cf. Moravcsik, 2003; Daniel and Moravcsik, 2013). In this sense, adhoc plurals are different from the regular, or additive plurals, which I consider to be default. Additive plurals are referentially homogeneous and are obtained through ‘adding up’ different referents of the singular noun. The discussion below will rely on this difference in reference structure.

3. Two understandings of APL According to the data in (Daniel and Moravcsik, 2013), one formal type of associative plurals dominates in the world’s languages. APL is commonly expressed by a means that is also, at least for some nouns, used to express additive plurals. This is the case in more than half of our WALS sample (note again that the set of languages, while covering most of the WALS core sample and different families and areas, is to a certain extent a convenience sample). I will focus on the interpretation of this kind of data, i.e. on the situation where APL formally equals regular plural marking (for special discussions of other formal types of APL, frequent to rare to unique, see Corbett, 2000; Daniel, 2000; Daniel, 2004). As opposed to the markers only expressing APL, or dedicated APL, this type may be called non-dedicated APL, or APL ¼ PL type. Unless indicated otherwise, below by APL I mean non-dedicated APL. Important observations on APL (see also Moravcsik, 2003) include, first, the fact that it is more common to have it formed from human proper names of people, and sometimes from kin terms, than from common nouns with human reference. Second, the named member of the group is pragmatically/socially more salient than its other members (parent more often than a child, man more often than a woman, etc). And third, APL most often designate families of the named referent though may also be interpreted as looser groups of associates, such as those people who are together with the focal referent at the reference time. Non-family groups as interpretation of APL may be more or less prominent in a language; they may and may not be appear in a descriptive grammar. Only family interpretations are often reported or are reported first. However, whether there are languages that actually limit APL interpretation to family groups remains an open question. A typical situation is exemplified in (1)–(3) for Archi, a language of the Lezgic branch of East Caucasian: (1) Archi: additive reading of the marker budra-tːu cucor-si edi bucket-Pl wash.Ipfv-Cvb PersPl.be.Pst ‘We were washing buckets.’ (2) Archi: family reading aʁa-tː-ij ¼ u mu-tː-ib k'ob aw Aga-Pl-Erg [ Add be.good-Attr-pl clothes NPl.do.Pfv ‘Aga's family, too, made nice clothes.’ (3) Archi: broad APL reading ba-qˤa sirwan-tːu, jat b-i-tː-ib marci HPl-come.Pfv Shirvan-Pl on.top HPl-be-Attr-Pl all ‘ . and here Shirwan and the others were coming, all the big shots (lit. all those on top).’

The fact that, in a language, APL is used as a designation of a family but may also refer to a non-family group, may be accounted for in two ways. First, we can suggest that the core meaning of APL as a linguistic category is the family relation. This core meaning may, under certain circumstances, fade away into, or extend to, a looser reading. Descriptive, or D-understanding: APL is a linguistic means whose (core) meaning is that of a family group; rarely, other groups are also included. On the other hand, we can suggest that the only function of APL is to activate, in the addressee’s mind, associations that link the focal referent to other entities. The fact that the default associations for a person are social links that connect him or her to close relatives is not an element of the linguistic system but an extralinguistic fact. If we are looking for elements of the same kind, i.e. humans, family relations are the type of association which is most easily available for a human referent. In other circumstances, social pragmatic links other than family relations may be activated to interpret APL, such as friendships, loyalties or the mere fact of currently being together (forming an adhoc group).

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Indexical, or I-understanding: APL is a linguistic means that provides the addressee with an instruction to activate associative relations that link the named (focal) referent to other entities. The difference between the two approaches to APL is broadly similar to the difference between two approaches to possessive constructions. An essentially comparative concept approach in (Koptjevskaja-Tamm, 2003) starts from a set of several meanings. The possessive relation is a relation that expresses legal possession, part-whole relation and/or kin relation but, in individual languages, may also cover other meanings. In a different perspective on possessive constructions, possessive relation is an association between two nouns, without any inherent semantic content (Partee 1983/1997/2010; Lander, 2009). Possessive relation may be by default or at least more often understood as legal possession or part-whole or kin relation, but it can also evoke other associations, depending on the items involved, broader context or speech act situation. Similarly, in its Dunderstanding, APL is a linguistic category that conveys a specific meaning: it designates a family group. In the I-understanding, it is an indexical category which is construed online. The distinction is made clear by the following argument. APL readings of the plurals of family names - Mr. Smith and his associates - seem to be reported relatively rarely (I consider examples of generic plurals such as Newtons ‘scholars of Newton’s scale’ as similatives, establishing an adhoc notional class rather than a set of specific referents). Plurals of family names of the SAE model – the Smiths, les Duponts – do not qualify as APL in the I-understanding, but fit into D-understanding. These forms designate family units, but all members of a family share the same family name and are directly referred to. They thus qualify as additive plural forms in terms of reference structure. Under D-understanding, we would not expect APL to be inherently definite/specific (cf. Moravcsik, 2003). We would expect cases like ‘This house is big enough for a grownup.man-APL (for a man with his family)’. Instead, APL reference always seems to be definite, narrowed down to one specific focal referent and his group by the context or the situation. APL are proper names of group in a way similar to given names of individuals. They refer rather than describe (cf. Kiparsky, 2013). One of the challenges of the D-understanding is that we need to explain why it is cross-linguistically so often the case that APL is contextually extensible to non-family reading. But to make this immediate argument robust enough to reject the Dunderstanding of APL we need to collect much more empirical data from languages where APL is attested; in fact, probably more than feasible in a typological investigation. The much less frequent non-family readings are often not attested in grammars and rare in texts, even in the languages where we know, from interviews with native speakers, that they do exist. As a result, my arguments for the I-understanding of APL will be based on circumstantial evidence. Some of the data I use is directly connected to the Animacy Hierarchy, including APL-related phenomena in nominals both from its higher and lower segment. The argument is not conclusive, but, hopefully, it opens ways to falsifying one or the other approach to APL. It also shows the difference between the typological contexts in which APLs are placed depending on their interpretation. As the difference between I-understanding and D-understanding of APL, in my argument, will be closely related to the Animacy Hierarchy, I will start the discussion with some issues with the Animacy Hierarchy-based approach to APL in Sections 4 and 5. 4. Mapping APL onto the Animacy Hierarchy: issues with pronouns Plurals of personal pronouns, or, for the sake of brevity, pronominal plurals, exhibit the property of being plurals that are construed online in the clearest possible way. By using a plural personal pronoun, the speaker does not convey any information on the referents of the group designated by a pronoun except that the group includes the speaker (‘we’) or the addressee (‘you.pl’). Pronominal plurals also represent a rare case where the focus may include several referents. This is the inclusive (‘the speaker, the addressee and (probably) others’) which is especially clear in the so-called minimal ~ augmented systems (Greenberg, 1988); see more on modeling inclusives in (Zwicky, 1977; Plank, 1985; Daniel, 2005). Pronominal plurals are referentially heterogeneous in a way similar to nominal associative plurals. They lexically specify (directly refer to) only one referent of the group. On these grounds, APL and pronominal plurals are sometimes considered realizations of the same category, generalized under the name of associative plurals in e.g (Corbett, 2000: 103, Cysouw, 2001: 66; Kiparsky, 2013; or group plurals - used as alternative name for APL - in Moravcsik, 1994), but under a separate name of representative plurals in (Daniel, 2000, 2005). There is an important difference between associative plurals in the sense of (Daniel and Moravcsik, 2013), on the one hand, and plurals of personal pronouns, on the other. While, like APL, pronominal plurals are referentially heterogeneous, unlike APL, they do not have any apparent default interpretation for the link that connects the focal referent to the associated entities. The meaning of APL is ‘X and associate(s)’, while the meaning of a pronominal plural is ‘X and other(s)’. This is especially clear if we consider the typologically rare cases of mismatches. On the one hand, some languages in addition to regular plural pronouns, feature kin pronominal plurals, i.e. plurals indicating a speech act participant and his or her family (see the discussion of Sursurunga in Corbett, 2000). ‘Unspecified’ pronominal plurals are different from ‘kin’ pronominal plurals in that they do not provide any cue for computing their reference other than those present in the context. In a sense, this is an expansion of nominal semantics of APL plurality into the domain of personal pronouns. On the other hand, there is an interesting and empirically convincing analysis of the Mandarin Chinese -men in (Iljic & 罗毅 2001). This pronominal plural suffix, obligatory with personal plural pronouns, is used on nouns primarily if these are used in address or self-reference, i.e. in the function of first and second person plural pronouns. This is an example of expansion in the opposite direction: the pronominal plural semantics are carried over into the domain of nouns. The two cases bring into focus the difference between APL and pronominal plurals. The two variety of plurals may expand either way, resulting in pronominal plurals on nouns or typical APL plurals formed from pronouns. Please cite this article as: Daniel, M., Associative plural as indexical category, Language Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.langsci.2019.101256

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This seems to be the functional motivation of the phenomenon that came to be known as inclusory pronominals (Lichtenberk, 2000; Singer, 2001), constructions where the reference of a NP (either a noun or a pronoun) used together with a plural personal pronoun is included in the reference of the latter. The diagnostics inclusory constructions is that a combination of two referring expressions, one of which itself has plural reference, may refer to as few as only two individuals. Thus, Russian my s toboj lit. ‘we together with you.sg’ may mean not only ‘speaker, addressee and more people’ but also ‘speaker and addressee’. Inclusory constructions are a way to make explicit the non-focal referents of the plural personal pronouns (the ‘others’); cf. (Ladusaw, 1989, via Lichtenberk, 2000). A similar reference overlap is sometimes observed between co-ordinated non-singular NPs if they have APL reading (Edgerton 1909 on elliptic duals of the Indo-European tradition, and discussion of the data from Dyrbal and Yidinji (Dixon, 1972; Dixon, 1977: 145–146) in Daniel 2000 and Kiparsky 2013). Obviously, pronominal plurals fall into the same category as nominal APL only under the I-understanding of APL. Both pronominal plurals and APL (in I-understanding) provide the addressee with an instruction to activate associative relations of the focal referent. Unlike APL, pronominal plurals have no obvious favorite associative type and are much more situational. The reason for this is the obligatory use of personal hierarchies to choose the most salient member of the group, the speaker and/or the addressee, as the focus. For a discussion, see (Plank, 1985; Daniel, 2005, early insights in Edgerton, 1909). Otherwise, the similarities between the plurals of personal pronouns and nominal APL seem to nicely map onto the Animacy Hierarchy. This mapping is usually discussed without a special mention of third person plural pronouns (but cf. Corbett, 2000; Cysouw, 2001), where the interpretation similar to plural personal pronoun is at least less prominent. Inclusory constructions are attested in the third person, too, which is diagnostic of heterogeneous reference (Daniel, 2000). But, in this case, being referentially heterogeneous is dependent on the context of the use of third person. Cf. heterogeneous they in Where is Peter? - They are coming vs. homogeneous they in Peter met Mary in a park. Two months later they married. This makes relating the phenomena under discussion to the Animacy Hierarchy less straightforward. Why should human proper names be grouped together with personal pronouns in that both form plurals that are necessarily heterogeneous, while (half)-skipping the intermediate step where third person pronouns are often placed, as in e.g. Croft (2003): 130), for which both heterogeneous and homogeneous plurals are available?

5. Mapping APL onto the Animacy Hierarchy: issues with cutoff points Another problem with mapping APL onto the Animacy Hierarchy arises from considering cutoff points. Among nouns with human reference, given names are especially prone to form APL ¼ PL. One way to account for this would be placing human proper names on a higher segment of the Animacy Hierarchy - above common human nouns, below personal pronouns. To do so we need to provide typological evidence that proper names of people are treated differently from common names independently from APL considerations. This is not non-existent; cf., for instance, prenominal genitives in German. Just as in the case with APL, human proper names keep company with kin terms. Human proper names are quoted as a relevant category on the Animacy Hierarchy by Croft (2003: 130), and human proper names and kin terms, by Dixon (1994: 85ff.) But nominal splits that cut the Animacy Hierarchy so as to distinguish common human nouns from human proper names and/or kin terms in anything but APL seem to be by far less common than splits at other cutoff points - personal vs. third person pronouns, pronouns vs. nouns, human vs. non-human nouns or animate vs. inanimate nouns. Apart from its discussion in connection with number marking, the workings of the Animacy Hierarchy are probably best studied in the domain of case marking. In his discussion of case marking splits, Dixon (1994: 87) only quotes Yidin as supporting separate categories of human proper names and kin terms. Bickel and co-authors (2015) note that splits sensitive to kin terms are rare, and human proper names are not discussed as a cutoff point altogether. They provide an example of argument marking in Gumbaynggir (Pama-Nyungan); the same example is quoted in (Schmidtke-Bode and Levshina, 2018); but Helmbrecht et al. (2018, note 3) argue against this example as resulting from a misinterpretation. In the survey of the statistics of splits for differential object marking in (Levshina, 2018) based on the data from the Autotyp project (Bickel et al., 2017), the author only quotes three cases out of 175 which involve reference to the categories of human proper names and/or kin terms. For differential agent marker, it is four out of 40 languages. In both counts, two of the relevant cases represent the same two genealogically related languages, Central and Eastern Pomo (Levshina, 2018: 147–148). Finally, in a special study considering case marking splits and hierarchical systems in a search for evidence in favor of human proper names and kin terms as a separate typological category, Helmbrecht et al. (2018) come to the conclusion that such evidence is meagre or even contradicts the usual view of the Animacy Hierarchy. Out of a sample of 30 languages, only two indicate that human proper names are attributed a separate position on the Animacy Hierarchy (one of them is, again, Yidin). Two more languages are quoted as evidence contradicting the Animacy Hierarchy by placing both human proper names and kin terms higher than some of the pronouns with human reference. This includes the case of Gumbaynggir, mentioned above, which treats human proper names and kin terms together with first and second person pronouns while separately not only from common nouns but also from third person pronouns (It is not however clear whether such evidence can be considered as counterexample; indeed, one could argue that human proper names and kin terms are more invariably discourse prominent than third person pronouns; cf. discussion of third person plural pronouns in inclusory constructions above). Out of the five languages with hierarchical marking, one provides evidence for a special treatment of human proper names. Because of the scarcity of the data on proper names in descriptive grammars, the sample is small and unbalanced, with Please cite this article as: Daniel, M., Associative plural as indexical category, Language Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.langsci.2019.101256

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three languages with hierarchical marking coming from the same family. The results, according to the authors themselves, are far from being conclusive. It does not matter, for my purposes, that Bickel et al. (2015) argue against scale effects in differential case marking altogether, while Levshina (2018) provides another view of the statistical evidence that upholds them. Also, the argument is valid independently on whether we consider the integrated version of the Animacy Hierarchy or decompose it into interacting nominal scales (e.g. Croft, 2003: 130–132), where the resulting hierarchy may have different language-specific configurations, depending on the relative prominence of its components (Haude and Witslack-Makarevich, 2016; Levishina; 2018). All that matters is that, with very few exceptions, the categories of kin terms and human proper names are largely irrelevant for splits in argument marking as compared to APL. The situation is somewhat different with number marking. The Animacy Hierarchy came into discussion in relation to number (Smith-Stark, 1974; see an overview in Corbett, 2000: 54ff.) very early. Corbett notes that evidence for number distinctions being sensitive to kin is meagre as compared to other points on the Hierarchy (p. 60), quoting examples of Kobon, East New Highlands (Papua New Guinea); Kalkatungu, Pama-Nyungan; and Maori, Austronesian. In (Koptjevskaja-Tamm and Dahl, 2001), an overview of grammatical features of kin terms, the only evidence of number split sensitive to kin terms are two examples of additive plural formation specific to kin terms. This is followed by the mention of the constraint of APL formation to “proper names and (certain) kin terms” in (apparently) higher number of languages. No cases of purely additive plurals being sensitive to the distinction between human proper names and up vs. the rest, or grouping human proper names with kin terms as opposed to lower nominals are reported. Our data seems to indicate that the preference of APL reading of plurals of human proper names as opposed to common human nouns is very widespread. Once again, as (Helmbrecht et al., 2018) indicate, one should be cautious in jumping to conclusions. Descriptive grammars only very rarely explicitly discuss the grammar of proper names and only rarely, of kin terms. But this very lack of information may also be indicative, being in sharp contrast with the obvious prominence of human proper names in discussions of APL. As long as this asymmetry between the cutoff points observed for additive plurals and the cutoff points observed for APL, as well as the ambiguous behaviour of third person pronouns locked between the top of the Animacy Hierarchy and human proper names, remain unexplained, I want to defend an interpretation alternative to that based on the Animacy Hierarchy, as discussed in the next section. 6. Coercion by unique reference I suggest that APL ¼ PL are not formed from nouns located on a specific segment of the Animacy Hierarchy but arise as an interpretation of plural forms from nouns that resist additive pluralization. Given names have unique referents. APL are heterogeneous plurals, i.e. plurals formed on a noun that only refers to one of the referents of the set. Since a given name is difficult to pluralize in the additive sense, it coerces a non-additive interpretation of the plural marker. Note that, under this view, the additive plural is the default interpretation of a marker of the APL ¼ PL type. The coercion effect only applies to the given names when they are used as directly referring rather than descriptive terms, the difference discussed in logical philosophical literature (cf. e.g. Mill 1843 (2002); or a brief overview in Abbott, 2002). Thus, in I, too, know at least two Ahmads, the plural of a name is used in the sense of ‘people called Ahmad’. It is a plural of a referentially different use of a given name, also occurring in the singular where it may behave in a morphosyntactically special way (cf. the use of article in I, too, know an Ahmad vs. I, too, know Ahmad). It is unclear how common these contexts are in natural speech and/ or how cross-linguistically universal they are, but it is at least clear that this is a different use of a given name. In their default use, proper names simply refer, they do not describe (Frege, 1949). It is in this use that given names resist additive pluralization. In the following, I will disregard the descriptive use of given names, in which they behave as regular common nouns. A major problem with considering APL a result of semantic coercion are APL formed on kin terms. It is not very clear how exactly widespread is APL formation from kin terms - apparently less frequent than from given names, sometimes probably limited to just a few kin terms - but they certainly are not an infrequent phenomenon (Corbett, 2000; Koptjevskaja-Tamm and Dahl, 2001; Daniel and Moravcsik, 2013). Arguing that kin terms have unique reference is much more speculative than in the case of human proper names. In most of their uses, terms such as ‘father’ may be considered a noun with unique reference determined by the ego – leaving aside the anthropological discussion of classificatory uses of kin terms, anyone only has one father. It could, in principle, be argued that ‘father’ tends to have a single referent and is conceived, at least by some languages, as a noun with unique reference. This is similar as to argue that ‘you.pl’ is heterogeneous plural even though there may be multiple addressees (Greenberg, 1988; Cysouw, 2001: 71; Daniel, 2005). But although Koptjevskaja-Tamm and Dahl (2001) note that in Dalecarlian (part of the Swedish dialect continuum) some kin terms do not form plurals, most languages seem to allow for the plural of ‘father’ in the sense of ‘fathers to multiple egos’ (as in It’s the fathers’ day to help at school). Moreover, whatever one decides in the case of ‘father’, uncle or brother or son relations are not unique in the same sense, and yet Bagvalal and Mishar Tatar form APL from such kin terms (personal data). (4) Mishar Tatar: APL from a kinship term min äzi-lär-gä bar-a-m. I elder.brother-Pl-Dat go-Ipfv-1Sg ‘I am going to visit my elder brother and his family’.

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Kin terms with possible multiple referents are easily pluralizable in their regular kin meaning (‘sons’, ‘brothers’ etc.). One way to explain availability of associative plural readings with these nouns is to argue, once again, for the interaction with the Animacy Hierarchy, claiming that they are located immediately after human proper names, higher than common human nouns. But kin terms are in this sense similar to third person pronouns: they, too, do not have a unique referent but allow for both homogeneous and heterogeneous readings, as discussed in the previous section. A plausible explanation is that both third person pronouns and kin terms are often highly individuated in the discourse. Without being lexically specified for unique reference, they approach this status in specific contexts because they refer to a pragmatically salient individual. In this case, group relations are not necessarily activated by coercion; but they are there, available for activation. I would restrain from further discussion before more empirical cross-linguistic data are available on kin terms and third person pronouns from discourse studies. To sum up my hypothesis, I suggest that, in the examples so far, heterogeneous interpretation of regular plurals - that is, APL ¼ PL - results from coercion a non-pluralizable referents exert on the additive plural marker by resisting regular pluralization. It so happens that most nominals with such reference are located on the top of the Animacy Hierarchy. Kin terms and third person pronouns apparently lack the property of having a unique referent but allow for heterogeneous reading of plurals. If we map this on the conventional Animacy Hierarchy, the distribution is not as straightforward as suggested by Corbett’s scheme (2000: 86, Fig. 33) - cf. Table 1.

Table 1 Availability of two types of plural readings.

First person Second person Third person Human proper names Kin terms

Homogeneous

Heterogeneous

no possible yes (only descriptive uses) yes

yes yes possible yes possible

Contrary to the expectation based on the Animacy Hierarchy, third person, with its typically homogeneous plural, groups together with kin terms; while human proper names, with their heterogeneous plurals, group together with the first and second person. The hypothesis explains this by relying on inherently unique reference of proper names and uniqueness of speech act participants. Contrary to the expectation based on inherently unique reference, heterogeneous reference is available for both third person and kin terms. This is tentatively explained by suggesting that, with respect to pluralization, nominals highly individuated in discourse may align with nominals with inherently unique reference. Considering nominals with human reference does not provide conclusive evidence in favor of the factor of unique reference as opposed to the Animacy Hierarchy in determining availability of APL reading. Associative links are not necessarily activated by unique reference of the nominal stem. Referents highly individuated in the discourse (kin terms and third persons) may approach the behaviour of nominals with unique reference, which makes APL appear contiguous on the Animacy Hierarchy. To argue against the Animacy Hierarchy as a factor, I discuss further cases of interaction of these two factors, including occasional APL from human nouns (Section 7), mixed non-human-to-human APL-like structures (Section 8) and APL-like structures outside human nominals (Section 9).

7. Occasional APLuralization of human proper names and human nouns There is additional evidence indicating that it is not the high position on the Animacy Hierarchy that is relevant for availability of APL. The evidence is anecdotal, but its presence indicates at least a typological possibility that is worth further investigation. First, on the occasions that I discussed the phenomenon of APL with Russian speakers, or had a chance to observe APL formation in Russian discourse, one pattern was recurrent. Russian does not use the plural of given names for APL on a regular basis. Occasional APL plurals are however formed from given names or nicknames that are lexically unique themselves; they become conventional designations of a man and wife or a family in the usage of individual speakers. Similar usage of nonunique names is extremely rare to non-existent, or sounds like a joke. This effect cannot be accounted for in terms of the Animacy Hierarchy but is readily explained in terms of coercion; such given names do not allow even for their alternative reading as a plural of a descriptive use of a human proper name. Not unlike Russian data are lexicalized forms reported for ancient Indo-European languages, such as Latin Castores CastorPl ‘Castor and Pollux’ (twin brothers from the Trojan cycle), Cereres Ceres-Pl ‘Ceres and Proserpina’ (the goddess of agriculture  Mitra-Du ‘Mitra and Varuna’ (two solar deities from Vedic Sanskrit). Some of these forms are noted and her daughter), Mitra in Corbett, 2000) in connection to APL referring back to Edgerton (1909) (see also Delbrueck, 1893; the Greek forms under discussion as relevant are contested); cf. also Arabic al-‘Umaraani Umar-Du ‘Umar and Abu-Bakr’, the two first caliphs (Kiparsky, 2013). In all these languages, APL are not reported as used on a regular basis, and, whatever their status in actual use in Greek, Latin, Vedic or Arabic culture, they seem to be unique at least within the epic or sacred context. Another similar Please cite this article as: Daniel, M., Associative plural as indexical category, Language Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.langsci.2019.101256

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 adhvaryu-Du ‘the high example is attested for a common noun with pragmatically determined unique reference adhvaryu priest and his adjutant’. Similarly, los reyes, lit. the kings, which means ‘the king and the queen’, has been lexicalized in Spanish. Second, during a field session with a speaker of Mishar dialect of Tatar (Turkic), I have recorded a plural form of a proper name of a cow. This was unmistakably an APL: (5) Mishar Tatar: APL from a name of an animal min jɤldɤz-lar art-ɤ-n-nan bar-a-m. I Star-Pl after-3-Obl-Abl go-Ipfv-1Sg ‘I am going to fetch Star and its associate (the second cow)’.

One can argue that this use may be a result of personification of the cattle; then it can be understood as a shift up the Animacy Hierarchy. It is hard to argue against this interpretation; but my intuition at the moment was that, for my consultant, this was a relatively conventional way to refer to her cows, not a language game. This evidence then links directly to the discussion of occasional APL of given names. Note that the form referred to the cows belonging to the speaker, not to a ‘family of cows’. This can be expected, because, at least to a human, fatherhood and motherhood relations are less salient in animals, and cattle do not form families except for transient relations between the female and its recently born offspring(s). If this occasional use is to be interpreted within the more general typology of APL, it provides an argument in favor of saying that the family reading is not the core semantics of APL but a default associative link for humans (I-understanding). Another piece of indirect evidence comes from (Lewis, 1967), who notices a semantic difference between two morphological structures of a plural of a kin term in colloquial Turkish. (6) Colloquial Turkish (Lewis, 1967: 39): a. kardes¸-im-ler aunt-Poss1-Pl 'my brother and her family' b. kardes¸-ler-im aunt-Pl-Poss1 'my brothers'

If the plural applies to the noun that already carries a possessive marker – plural of ’my aunt’ – it reads as APL. If the possessive suffix follows the plural marker, it is an additive plural reading. I interpret this in the following way. Possessive marker increases the degree of individuation of the referent. As suggested in the previous section, referents with higher individuation may be closer to inherently unique, so their plural extends to associative interpretation. The evidence above indicates that, if supported by unique reference, APL-like formations may arise in languages which normally lack APL; or from non-human nouns if these are proper names. In all these cases, we observe availability of associative relations that link the named referent to its associates. However, this evidence is anecdotal. While one remains in the high segment of the Animacy Hierarchy, there can be no conclusive proof that it is the unique reference and recoverability of set relation rather than high position on the Animacy Hierarchy that triggers associative plural reading. Here, unique reference and high animacy seem to typically go hand in hand, and to part only rarely. Is there any possible evidence from lower segments that non-human nouns form APL-like structures? The answer is yes. Although these data are much less attested and/or reported in the grammars than APL from given names, they appear exactly in the situations predicted by the factors of unique reference and/or recoverability of set relation.

8. Heterogeneous plurals from down the Animacy Hierarchy The Mishar Tatar data cited in the previous section is arguably an example of extending APL down the Animacy Hierarchy, but only on occasional basis, in the speech of one consultant. Other examples from non-human domain are substantially different. In East Caucasian languages, place names - more specifically, names of local villages - are problematic in terms of their part-of-speech affiliation. Morphologically, they are more similar to spatial adverbs. In some of the languages of the family, however, they possess fragments of purely nominal morphology, including genitive and plural formation. Plurals of place names refer to the villagers who live in the named village. These plurals do not have singular counterparts (for which a different morphological derivation is employed). This is observed e.g. in Bagvalal (Andic), Aghul and Archi (Lezgic) (Daniel, 2019); cf. Aghul quruh ‘Qurux’, quruh-ar ‘the villagers of Qurux’, lit. Qurux-Pl (Daniel and Merdanova, 2001). These forms may be explained by a mechanism partly similar to that suggested above for APL from given names. Unique reference of a place name coerces a re-interpretation of the plural form. This re-interpretation is achieved by activating associative links of the named referent. In the case of a place name, links to its inhabitants are activated. (Interestingly, Aghul also suggests a different interpretation - the place name and its surroundings, which is closer to building an adhoc notional category). In this case, APL-like forms are not only produced from nouns other than human names, because place names are not nouns. They fall outside the nominal domain altogether, and thus cannot belong to the Animacy Hierarchy. Even though this derivation is morphologically regular, in all three languages this is a lexically restricted mechanism. Plurals are available for the names of the locally important place names, including the village where the language is spoken and its immediate neighbors, but only for them. With names of distant towns, such as Makhachkala (the capital of the Republic of Daghestan) or Moscow, this pattern is not observed. Please cite this article as: Daniel, M., Associative plural as indexical category, Language Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.langsci.2019.101256

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One of the anonymous reviewers suggested that plurals of place names may be alternatively analyzed as based on a shared property of co-inhabiting the same village. In this sense, it approaches other types of adhoc categories discussed in (Mauri, 2017). I see no way to argue for one (the focal element, which is a place name, activates links with associated elements, its inhabitants) or the other (the referents share a common property of inhabiting the same place) approach to these forms. In any case, it is an entity and not a property that is named (lexically referred to) in these forms. Whatever they are, these forms are reminiscent of certain lexicalized plurals that Corbett (2000) calls anti-associative. His example comes from Naukan Eskimo, where the form asja-t (lit. boat-Pl) means ‘the boat and those in it’. In addition to this form (Menovshikov and Vakhtin, 1990: 58), report Naukan Eskimo myntyga-t (lit. house-Pl) ‘house and its inhabitants’ which shows that this structure is not a unique lexicalization in the language but at least a lexicalization pattern. Delbrueck (1893: 162) reports ḥ (lit. house-Pl). All these formations show a structure very similar to that of the exactly the same meaning for the Vedic gṛha plurals of place names in East Caucasian but, judging from the reference grammars, are even more lexically restricted. In all these cases, the obvious difference from conventional APL as discussed above is that the elements of the set are of a nature different from the focal referent (hence Corbett’s calling them anti-associative). The associated elements are humans, while the focal referent is not. In all these cases it is not clear whether the focal referent is indeed included into the reference of the APL-like form or only serves as a starting point to calculate the reference of the form. In fact, it is hard to distinguish between the meanings ‘house and its inhabitants’ and ‘the inhabitants of the house’. But even in the latter case, the difference between these structures and APL is not so strong. It is unclear whether APL, in all their occurrences, necessarily contain the focal referent; this seem to vary from language to language (Daniel, 1999). These constructions are also lexically constrained, and only one of them - plurals of place names in East Caucasian - shares with the APLs up the Animacy Hierarchy the property of having unique referent. On the other hand, all of them are based on nouns referring to entities that serve as convenient foci for defining a set of associated humans. Associative links seem to be easily recoverable. All of them also seem to be lexically constrained in a way more similar to derivation than to inflection. They may be called lexical APLs. 9. Non-human lexical APL Some of the examples quoted above in Section 7 are known in Indo-European studies as elliptic plurals (Delbrueck, 1893; Corbett, 2000 quoting Edgerton, 1909; Grapow, 1939, also Rukeyser, 1997). These are non-singular forms that lexicalize reference to sets of elements departing from the name of one object of the set. Elliptic duals quoted above were referring to groups of humans. Below are some examples of non-human elliptic non-singulars: (7) (Molchanova, 1975: 205 ff.) Avestan: vana mortar-Du ‘mortar and pestle’ ha Vedic:

́

(8) drṣádau upper.millstone-Du ‘the upper and lower millstones’ (cf. úpal a ‘lower millstone’) (9) áhanı day-Du ‘day and night’ sau morning-Du ‘morning and night’ (10) uṣa va  sky-Du ‘earth and sky’ (11) dya

In Indo-European linguistics, these formations are explicitly linked to the notion of a natural pair (Delbrueck, 1893: 137 ff.). Delbrueck suggested that elliptic plurals are only present in those languages that lack duals, so that all elliptic non-singulars are also inherently dual. However, there are examples where the forms with the same reference structure are used to designate sets of more than two objects. (12) Nganasan, Uralic (courtesy Valentin Gusev) d'intə-güa-t'ə n'i-ntə-biambi-s koi-ˀ bow-Emph-Acc.Pl.2Sg Neg-Fut-Ren-2Sg leave-Cn ‘Don't forget your bow and arrows (lit. bows)!’

Nganasan examples disprove the connection to duality (see also Edgerton, 1909). It is an extralinguistic fact that many ̊ sets of objects humans use consist of only two items (or rather many sets where one object is prominent enough to provide a good starting point to compute non-homogeneous reference by activating its links to the other object(s)). Unlike given names and similarly to anti-associatives above, nominal roots in (7) to (13) designate objects that are not unique. We cannot explain APL-like reference structure produced by pluralization by invoking the principle of unique referent once again. But these referents are so prone to be viewed as elements of sets that the relevant associative links are activated without coercion. A mechanism at least partially similar to that of APL is applied in a lower segment of the Animacy Please cite this article as: Daniel, M., Associative plural as indexical category, Language Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.langsci.2019.101256

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Hierarchy. Note, however, that some of the examples in this section may be viewed as ambiguous between group-based and frame-based categories - see discussion in Section 2 - also because, unlike APL, in most of the cases the named referent is not salient in any clear way. 10. Discussion I started the discussion by suggesting that there are two possible approaches to APL. In the first approach, based on the function of the form, APL is a nominal form or construction with human reference that designates a family of the named referent (D-understanding, for descriptive); the use of the form may extend to non-core meanings such as non-family relationships (friends) and further to even less stable groups. In the other approach, APL is a special type of plural reference structure. APL shows heterogeneous plural reference which is different from that observed in referentially homogeneous (additive) plurals. It is understood as an instruction issued by the speaker to the addressee to construct a set of referents connected to the named referent by links that (s)he can recover from the situation or from his or her world knowledge. It is an indexical category construed online (I-understanding, for indexical). Family is a ‘mould’ that APL typically takes in a speech act because family relations are socially and thus pragmatically salient and easily recoverable, but not its core meaning in the sense of functional semantic typology. Other links of association may be activated if they are recoverable by the addressee. Admittedly, the indexical approach is adhered to in many or most treatments of APL (Corbett, 2000: 101, Moravcsik, 2003; Daniel and Moravcsik, 2013; Kiparsky, 2013), at least at the level of definition (‘X and associates’). The purpose of this paper is not so much to convince the reader that the definition based on indexical approach is better than the functional semantic one. It is, first, to take the functional semantic definition as an alternative more seriously, and, second, to explore the full consequences of the indexical approach; among other things, the role of the Animacy Hierarchy vs. the effect of semantic coercion. Note that a similar controversy between two approaches to possessive relation (cf. e.g. Partee 1983/1997/2010 and Koptjevskaja-Tamm, 2004), is often resolved in favor of the functional semantic definition, at least among typologists, while the case of APL has been dominated by the logical semantic perspective oriented to the analysis of reference structure from the very beginning. The indexical approach provides a good account for the flexibility of APL ¼ PL. It accounts for both why APLs are not limited to family meaning, on the one hand, and why they most typically designate family groups, on the other. Humans are most saliently linked to each other by (nuclear) family relations which constitute a natural human set; but other, secondary and less fixed relations may be socially or contextually relevant. The fact that, in many languages we have data for, APL is flexible (extensible to non-family groups) in itself seems to be an argument in favor of the indexical approach. The strength of the argument is however limited before we know the typological scope of the phenomenon of flexibility. How universal are flexible APL ¼ PL? are there (m)any APL ¼ PL restricted to family reading? are there any APL markers that may not designate a family but only a more loosely bound group? Answers to all these questions are relevant to (dis)prove the indexical approach, and descriptive grammars are usually not reliable in this respect, because they tend to focus on the most frequent interpretation of APL. I do not exclude that APL limited to family reading (thus a functional semantic category) are present at least among dedicated APLs, to which the coercion analysis is not applicable. But there is evidence that dedicated APL limited to family groups may develop into flexible APL in the course of time. In Dargwa (East Caucasian), the flexible APL marker -qale most probably originated from ‘house’, ‘household’. It thus seems plausible to admit that the use of the marker started from family APL and only gradually developed into flexible APL. Both this issue and the role dedicated APL markers play in the typology of APL, as well as the relative position of dedicated and non-dedicated APL markers on the flexibility scale, remain topics for further empirical investigations. This is why I was trying to limit the discussion to non-dedicated APL. The indexical approach is directly related to another issue in the typology of APL, its attraction to human proper names. I have argued that APL reading of a regular plural marker is coerced by the unique reference of the nominal stem. The designation of a unique referent, resisting the default, additive pluralization, achieve plurality by activating associative links available to its referent. There is no semantics inherent to relations to be activated. This idea is incompatible with any approach that interprets APL as a functional (rather than indexical) category. Cross-linguistically, APLs are most typical of human proper names. This seems to be another strong argument in favor of considering the nature of APL as being indexical (coerced by unique reference) rather than semantic functional (expressing the family meaning) phenomenon. This assimilates APLs to first and second person plural pronouns. Speech act participants are inherently unique referents, and the respective plurals show a reference structure similar to that of APL. Both pronominal plurals and, to a lesser degree, APLs are involved in inclusory constructions as defined in (Lichtenberk, 2000; Singer, 2001). The fact that APLs are typically formed on human proper names has been alternatively explained by the Animacy Hierarchy effects (Corbett, 2000): given names are assumedly located higher than common human nouns. The suggestion that APL are controlled by the Animacy Hierarchy (rather than derive from unique reference) is supported by the observation that they often extend to kinship terms. Indeed, the argument that (all) kinship terms have inherently unique referents cannot be reasonably maintained. To support the explanation based on unique reference, one can argue that nominals that tend to be highly individuated in the discourse behave as nominals with inherently unique referents, i.e. personal pronouns and given names. Although this may sound as a patch, this also solves the problem of third person plurals. Third person plurals may be involved in inclusory constructions just as plural of personal pronouns. It is thus reasonable to admit that they, too, may be Please cite this article as: Daniel, M., Associative plural as indexical category, Language Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.langsci.2019.101256

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heterogeneous (one salient member and its associates), even if they are probably more common as homogeneous plurals. This is difficult to account for in terms of the position on the Animacy Hierarchy. While third person is commonly placed between personal pronouns and human nouns (Croft, 2003), APL typology places it lower than human proper names. Data on occasional APL from Mishar Tatar (a plural form of the name of a cow), Russian (unique given names) and the socalled elliptic duals from ancient Indo-European languages (e.g. Edgerton, 1909) all seem to indicate that unique reference is more important than merely being a given name or even referring to a human. But these examples constitute anecdotal rather than systematic evidence, and may be explained by individuation or personification on adhoc basis. Here, more crosslinguistic data on contextualized uses of APL are required. Inherently unique reference is not required to trigger activation of associative links as an alternative to regular pluralization. Within the domain of human nouns, both the choice between functional semantic vs. indexical interpretation of APL and the choice between unique reference (Daniel and Moravcsik, 2013; Kiparsky, 2013) vs. the Animacy Hierarchy (Corbett, 2000) as the primary factor triggering APL formation, can not, at least at the present stage of empirical knowledge, be unambiguously prioritized. But the implications of the choices are very different. Let us assume that APL is a semantic functional category, designation of family groups. Basically, the story ends here. The argument that APL supports the Animacy Hierarchy (by being limited to its top segment) is anyway weakened, because pronominal plurals are not APL in this definition (family is not their core meaning). Otherwise, applicability of APL to human nouns only is definitional, because humans and nothing else form families. The fact that APLs show a clear preference for the higher segment of the Animacy Hierarchy (given names) is a weak argument in favor of its relevance to APL, because this cutoff point is not widely attested elsewhere and is better explained by unique reference coercion. Occasional APL of the anecdotal type are also somewhat better explained by coercion. On the other hand, considering APL to be an indexical phenomenon opens ways to compare APL from human nouns to other deviant plurals across the board. First of all, plurals of personal pronouns ideally fit into this model of APL. Lexical APLlike forms from non-human nouns are also covered by this definition, including Corbett’s anti-associative plurals, East Caucasian plurals of place names, the non-human elliptic plurals in ancient languages (mortar and pestle etc.) and their equivalents in modern languages (bow and arrows). They are based on reference to a salient element of a set, so that relations linking the non-focal elements to the focus are easily retrievable from the world knowledge. They are similar to APL, providing examples of extension of heterogeneous plural reference pattern to the lower segments of the Animacy Hierarchy. However, unlike humans, only few types of objects form permanent sets, and very few (place names) have unique referents. As a result, APL-like structures from non-human nouns are not indexical in the sense that this reference seems to be lexically conventionalized. 11. Conclusion To summarize, I have compared two approaches to the understanding of the nature of APL, one being functional semantic (designation of family group), the other based on the reference structure of APL forms (heterogeneous plural reference, presence of a salient focus, activation of associative links, often coerced by plural reference) and not directly connected to the family meaning. I presented a range of arguments in favor of the second approach from within the domain of human plural reference. I also have discussed a range of linguistic phenomena beyond human plurals, from restricted inflectional patterns to individual lexicalizations, that become included into APL under this approach. At the present state of our empirical knowledge about APL cross-linguistically, these arguments may not be accepted as conclusive. APL from kin terms may be considered as an argument against the role of unique reference and in favor of the Animacy Hierarchy based explanation. On the other hand, third person pronouns indicate to the contrary. This suggests the kind of evidence we should be looking for in the future. Are there (m)any languages where APL reading of regular plural markers is limited to family groups? are dedicated APL markers different from APL ¼ PL in this respect? can more evidence be found of occasional APL such as plurals of given names of animals? The prediction of the advocated approach would be that all APL, or at least all non-dedicated APL (i.e. APL ¼ PL) always allow for non-family reading. Answering these questions, challenging the prediction and providing more empirical evidence of the kind I discussed in this paper will hopefully support indexical interpretation of APL as a truly adhoc category and will in any case advance our understanding of APL as a cross-linguistic phenomenon. References Abbott, B., 2002. Discussion note: definiteness and proper names: some bad news for the description theory. J. Semant. 19 (2), 191–201. https://doi.org/10. 1093/jos/19.2.191. Barotto, A., Mauri, C., 2018. Constructing lists to construct categories. Italian Journal of Linguistics 30 (1), 95–134. https://doi.org/10.26346/1120-2726-117. Bickel, B., Witzlack-Makarevich, A., Zakharko, T., 2015. Typological evidence against universal effects of referential scales on case alignment. In: BornkesselSchlesewsky, I., Malchukov, A., Richards, M. (Eds.), Scales and Hierarchies: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin & Boston, pp. 7– 43. Corbett, G., 2000. Number. Oxford University Press, London. Croft, W., 2003. Typology and Universals. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 2009 Cysouw, M., 2001. The Paradigmatic Structure of Person Marking. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Dahl, Ö., Koptjevskaja-Tamm, M., 2001. Kinship in grammar. In: Baron, I., Herslund, M., Sørensen, F. (Eds.), Dimensions of Possession, pp. 201–226. Benjamins.

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Please cite this article as: Daniel, M., Associative plural as indexical category, Language Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.langsci.2019.101256