In Yaeyaman, a critically endangered Japonic language of the Southern Ryukyus, there is a distinction made between singular and plural wh-questions, with plurality indicated by reduplication of the indeterminate (wh) pronoun. I argue that reduplication of the indeterminate is triggered by a morpheme RED that requires the presence of non-atoms in the set of Hamblin alternatives denoted by its si...

Let’s fix some terminology at the start. A world (or possible world – for me, the ‘possible’ is redundant) is, first, an individual, not a set or class; second, a particular, not a property or universal; third, concrete in this sense: it is fully determinate in all qualitative respects; and, fourth, a maximal interrelated whole: each world is internally unified, and isolated from every other wo...

This paper investigates morphological alternation between so-called extended and restricted roots in Ranmo, leading to a new proposal about the nature of pluractional predicates. Extended roots show properties associated with ‘pluractional’ verbs attested crosslinguistically; in particular, they are associated with both plural participant and iterative interpretations. However, they differ from...