Coppock presents on reduplicated numerals in Newar at SULA-TripleA 2026
At the epic SULA-TripleA 2026 conference, bringing together Semanticists who work on Understudied Languages of the Americas and semanticists who work on languages of Africa Asia, and Austronesia, Elizabeth Coppock presented a paper entitled “Unifying dependent-indefinite and independent-universal numeral reduplication in Newar”.
Abstract:
This paper presents new fieldwork data on reduplicated numerals in Newar (a.k.a. Nepal Bhasa), a Sino-Tibetan language with a rich numeral classifier system spoken primarily in the Kathmandu Valley region of Nepal. As in Hungarian, Telugu, and Kaqchikel, among many other languages, reduplicated numerals in Newar signal distributivity, functioning as dependent indefinites. What sets the Newar case apart is that reduplication of the numeral ‘one’ can additionally be interpreted as a universal quantifier without a licensor. These independent-universal uses constitute an apparent violation of Gil’s conjecture that reduplicated distributivity markers always mark the share rather than the key in a distributive relation. This paper offers a unified analysis of both uses, building on Dynamic Plural Logic and adopting the anaphoric co-indexing advocated by Kuhn on the basis of data from ASL. The key claim is that independent-universal uses arise when the share variable and the key variable are co-indexed, so that constraints normally imposed only on the key—atomicity and maximality—are inherited by the share, producing a universal interpretation exhausting the nominal domain.