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. I am deeply grateful to Hagit for the innumerable meetings over the last five years, always constructive, and always leaving me thinking for days. It is thanks to her clear, constructive, and to the point feedback and advice on my work that I became able to organize my thoughts and ideas sufficiently clearly enough to ask others for feedback. I am also very grateful to Hagit for the support and encouragement she has given me directly as well as indirectly by the great amount of investment she put into training me. Hagit has been and continues to be an incredibly empowering mentor and role model, in linguistics and in life. I am also extremely grateful to my thesis co-chair, Roumyana Pancheva, for all her advice, feedback, generosity, and encouragement. I am very thankful to Roumi for her unconditional support through the last five years, for all the meetings, for all the detailed comments, and for all her linguistic and practical advice. I am especially grateful to Roumi for always reminding me of what’s important. iv I am also extremely grateful to Irene Heim for all the feedback she has given me on this thesis, for the skype meetings, and for the meetings we had any time I was in Boston. Our meetings constituted growth spurts in my work, and in my training, and her feedback on the drafts of this thesis and other topics we have discussed, has lead me to look at my work in a different light, and to greatly strengthen my arguments. I am also very grateful to Audrey Li for her always constructive, efficient, and stimulating meetings. For phrasing suggestions, constructive criticisms, and advice, so nicely that they sound like compliments. I am very grateful for the great suggestions, and for the great meetings, and for the contagiously positive personality. I am also extremely grateful to Kevin van Bladel for his extremely useful feedback and advice on everything Arabic and Semitic in this thesis, for always having very insightful and useful comments on my work, and for his invaluable advice on the link between my work and work in traditional Arabic grammar. David Pesetsky, while he wasn’t technically part of my dissertation committee, may as well have been. I am very grateful to David for the incredibly enlightening meetings we had, and for his feedback and suggestions, especially on the work on which chapters 3 and 4 are based, which has been an integral part of the development of this thesis. I am extremely grateful to Lina Choueiri for her contribution to my training as a linguist, for her discussion of every part of this thesis as it came into existence and on everything I have done in linguistics since 2005 – when she introduced me to the wonderful thing that is Syntax. I am very grateful to Lina, and to her incredible teaching skills, her immense generosity with her time, advice, and feedback, and for her continued mentorship and friendship long after I left AUB. I am also very thankful to all the professors at USC, who have taught me, met with me, and given me feedback on different work I’ve done during my PhD. Barry Schein was the v source of much of my excitement about semantics and semantic issues, as I absolutely loved his classes in semantics, as well as every meeting we had after that. Barry met with me innumerable times over the course of my PhD, which was always thought provoking and immensely enjoyable. I am particularly grateful to him for reminding me to “think of linguistic puzzles as a curious 10 year old”, as that is the best way to think of any new puzzle. I am also grateful to Jean-Roger Vergrnaud for encouraging me to think outside the box, and for always treating me like a full-fledged linguist even when I was still a first year student who barely knew where the conference room was. I am thankful to Ania Lubowicz and to Rachel Walker for teaching me all about phonology, as well as for their feedback on my papers and abstracts. I am also grateful to Louis Goldstein, James Higginbotham, Hajime Hoji, Khalil Iskarous, Elsi Keiser, Andrew Simpson, Maria-Luisa Zibizarreta, Elena Guerzoni, and Iskandar Mansour for their contribution to my linguistic and professional training and to my experience as a graduate student. During my visit to MIT, I benefited immensely from discussions with and advice from Sabine Iatridou, who was my supervisor during my visit. I am very grateful to Sabine, who met with me on the content of this thesis and on work I was doing on modals. Meeting with her was always thought-provoking and enlightening. I am also very grateful to Kai von Fintel and Jan Andersen, for very useful meetings and discussions. I also enjoyed and profited from the courses I attended with Irene Heim, Dani Fox, Kai von Fintel, David Pesetsky, and Sabine Iatridou. My MIT visit was a jumpstart in my work on this thesis. I am also very grateful to the faculty (staff) at Queen Mary University of London, who made my visit there extremely beneficial. I benefited a lot from meetings with Paul Elbourne, Daniel Harbour, and David Adger; and I was reminded, yet again, of how exciting semantics is, thanks to Paul’s class. I am thankful to all three of them, as well as to Hagit, and Linnaea Stockall for making my visit to QMUL so enriching and enjoyable. I am also very grateful to my wonderful friends and colleagues at USC, MIT, and QMUL. Thanks to my wonderful cohortmates Hector Velasquez, David Li, Canan Ipek, Ben vi Parrell, Katy McKinney-Bock, Erika Varis-Doggett, Lucy Kim, Mary Byram-Washburn, and Xiao He. I am particularly grateful to Xiao for keeping me nourished during my second year screening paper ‘crunch time’. Thank you to TNG (The Nominal Group) at USC for stimulating discussions on the syntax and semantics of the DP: Ulrike Steindl, Giang Le, Mythili Menon, Katy McKinney-Bock, Yi-Hsien Liu, Brian Hsu, Alfredo Garcia Pardo, Syed Saurov, Priyanka Biswas. I’m thankful to Thomas Borer, Iris OuYang, Roger Liao, Peter Guekguezian, Arunima Choudhury, Barbara Tomaszewicz, Erin Tavano, Assaf Israel, Caitlin Smith, Christina Hagedorn, Ellen O’Connor, Emily Fedele, Najah Atrash, Antonia Szabari, for making life at USC much easier and happier. And of course, I am very grateful to Janet Andersen and her radiant source of positive energy, Michal Temkin Martinez who has been a true big sister to me, a career counselor, a source of encouragement, an accountability buddy, and a friend in every sense, and last but not least, Michael Shepherd, who started by proof-reading my screening paper, trained me to do it myself, and ended with forming a mutual proof-reading (and abstract shortening) relationship that has lasted years, as well as a wonderful friendship that I will always cherish. Last but not least, A big thank you to Joyce Perez, for knowing every USC rule under the sun, for explaining how everything is done with clear, consise, and to the point instructions, for being a wonderful friend, and for making USC feel like home from day one. I am also very grateful to the brilliant colleagues at Queen Mary, who made me feel at home during my visiting time there, among them Fryni Panayidou, Fangfang Niu, Abigael Candelas, David Hall, Annette Zhao, Catherine Gritziou, Tom Stanton, Agnieszka Knaś, Philippa Law. And for the great people I met at MIT, Eva Cipak Bochnak, Rosmin Mathew, Hrayr Khanjian, Pritty Patel-Grosz, Patrick Grosz, Igor Yanovich, Mitcho Erlewine, Michelle Fullwood, and others. It was a pleasure to share this experience with such intellectually stimulating colleagues and friends. Other colleagues and professors in the field have also been, either personally or through their work, a source of intellectual enrichment and inspiration during my training, including El-Abbas Benmamoun, Jenny Doetjes, Lisa Cheng, Noam Chomsky, Hamida vii Demirdache, Youssef Haddad, Peter Hallman, Tania Ionin, Ora Matushansky, Susan Rothstein, Uli Sauerland, Ur Shlonsky, Usama Soltan, and Youri Zabbal.