Austin Kraft (McGill) will be presenting a talk “Generalizing measurement in Javanese.” The meeting will take place on Monday, December 2 at 3pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department. Austin’s abstract is below:
Javanese (Malayo-Polynesian) allows numerals in pre- and post-nominal position. I propose that numeral position tracks a measurement/individuation distinction: among DPs containing numerals, those with pre-nominal numerals denote measurement, and those with post-nominal numerals do not. Javanese numeral morphosyntax offers overt evidence for Landman’s (2004) hypothesis that numerals lead double lives in natural language: they can denote properties of individuals or numerical primitives. This work builds on longstanding Javanese descriptions (Horne 1961, Soemarmo 1979) while furthermore considering DPs with pre-nominal numerals but no readily conventionalized measurement unit. I present data that pose challenges for past accounts of numeral alternations: the alternations are not semantically vacuous, nor are they a reflex of definiteness (cf. Syed 2020 for the closely related Madurese patterns) or of a mass/count distinction (contra Ishizuka 2008). Among its implications, the compositional approach here bears on the syntactic and semantic formation of complex numerals (Ionin and Matushansky 2006).
Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYvfu6orzIrHtEHSdthyymSx50ZHxlHqvwu.