Semantics of Turkish plural marking revisited

Abstract

It has been claimed in some recent theoretical and experimental studies that in addition to the exclusive reading, there is evidence for the inclusive reading of the plural marker -lAr in Turkish (Sağ 2019 and Renans et al. 2020, among others). The main argumentation comes from the inclusive interpretation of the plural marker in syntactically negative sentences and in certain other downward entailing contexts. However, based on new data, I argue in this paper that the plural marker is primarily associated with the exclusive reading in Turkish (Bliss 2004, Bale et al 2010, Görgülü 2012, Bale and Khanjian 2014, among others) and the apparent inclusive reading arises only in the context of certain logical operators in the structure. More importantly, I show that the experimental design in recent experimental studies has certain issues. This is because number marking in the nominal system of Turkish was not actually taken into consideration in the design process of the experimentation, which apparently led to certain interpretive complications for participants. Thus I argue that a much better way to look at the meaning of plural marking should be through a more careful consideration of the specification of the number and plural marking system in the language.