Where Number Lies: Plural Marking, Numerals, and the Collective-Distributive Distinction
i Where Number Lies: Plural marking, numerals, and the collective-distributive distinction by Sarah Ouwayda Submitted to the USC Graduate School In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics at the University of Southern California 2014 Dissertation committee: Hagit Borer (Chair), Professor of Linguistics Irene Heim, Professor of Linguistics, Massachussets Institute of Technology Audrey Li, Professor of Linguistics and East Asian Languages and Cultures Roumyana Pancheva (Co-Chair), Associate Professor of Linguistics Kevin van Bladel, Associate Professor of Classics ii Dedication To Abboudeh, for the love of unanswered questions, And to Hodhod, for the love of crafting tools To both, for the longing to find answers iii Acknowledgements They say university years are the best time of your life. My experience so far is that this generalization is only true if you don’t go to grad school. The years I spent in grad school have been the most exciting, enriching, and intellectually stimulating years of my life. And I owe this to the professors, colleagues, and friends I had and those I encountered along the way. I will take the opportunity of finishing my thesis to publicly express my gratitude to and for these wonderful people who contributed to my training and shared the experience with me on three continents. First of all, I am extremely grateful to my wonderful committee members for their support and advising throughout the writing of this thesis. I would like to publicly express my immense gratitude to my Doktormutter, Hagit Borer, for being an amazing advisor, for her generosity, patience, and most of all, for her rigor: for making a linguist out of a very eager, and rather frightened, computer engineer.
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