Distributivity
An expression such as the students left can be interpreted collectively (the students left together) or distributively (the students left one by one). We can disambiguate these readings with words such as together, one by one, each and respectively. I am currently involved in a couple of projects where we are trying to better understand this topic. One project involves so-called binominal each (as in “the students read a book each”). This work has led us to explore distributive operators cross-linguistically; for example, we are trying to understand the difference between var and varsin in Swedish. The project has also led us to think about the nature of indefinite noun phrases. Collaborators: Raj Singh, Dejan Milacic, Ashley Sokalski, Kunio Hessel, Lisa Sullivan and Elisabeth Wood.
Another project (with Petter Morottaja and Raj Singh) involves comitative coordination in Inari Saami, which seems to involve a collective interpretation.
Forthcoming. The syntax of Inari Saami: a focus on case and agreement. With Petter Morottaja. Under review for Tamm and Vainikka (eds.) Uralic Syntax.
2019. Distributive possessors in Swedish and Norwegian: binding, agreement, and quantification. With Helge Lødrup and Raj Singh. In: Miriam Butt, Tracy Holloway King and Ida Toivonen (eds.), {\it Proceedings of the LFG19 Conference}, 170–190. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
2016. Distance distributivity and the semantics of indefinite noun phrases. With Raj Singh. Carleton Linguistics Group talk
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2015. On the morphosyntactic representation of dependent quantification: distance
distributivity, dependent indefinites, and Skolemization. With Dejan Milacic and Raj Singh. Proceedings
of Sinn und Bedeutung 19
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