Syntactic Complexity and Competition: The Singular-Plural Distinction in Western Armenian
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Bale-2014-Syntactic Complexity.pdf
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Author(s)
Bale, Alan
Khanjian, Hrayr
Date Issued
January 2014
Journal
Linguistic Inquiry
Publisher
MIT Press
Citation
Bale, Alan, and Hrayr Khanjian. “Syntactic Complexity and Competition: The Singular-Plural Distinction in Western Armenian.” Linguistic Inquiry 45, no. 1 (January 2014): 1–26. © 2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Version
Final published version
Abstract
There is much debate in the linguistic literature about what mechanisms are responsible for accessing, implementing, and restricting grammatical competition. Building on this line of research, this article explores competition between plural and singular marking in Western Armenian, a language where grammatical competition results in a restricted interpretation of singular nouns. Of interest to competition theories in general, this restriction only occurs in certain grammatical environments: namely, definite NPs. As argued here, an adequate treatment of these facts requires comparing utterances in terms of their syntactic complexity (as Katzir (2007) proposes).
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1162/LING_a_00147
