Abstract:

Languages have different ways of conveying distributive readings with different markers of distributivity. They are also known as ‘distributive numerals’ and they have their roots in classical grammatical and philological studies; Gil (1982a) introduced them into formal linguistics through his doctoral thesis entitled ” Distributive Numerals”. This article presents a detailed description of the Kosovo Albanian morpheme nga occurring on the 'Share' constituent in a distributive-read construction. Spoken Albanian in Kosovo – being steeped in the northern Gheg diaclect, differs considerably from Standard Albanian -- has been made the object of this study. At the outset, this research article offers an account of available linguistic theories of distributivity (Gil 1982a, 1982b, 1988, 2005, Choe 1987, 1991, Farkas 1997, Cable 2014, Kuhn 2019). Drawing on these theories, we explore the morphological, syntactic and interpretive constraints bearing on the nga-marker in Albanian, and propose a syntactic analysis of this morpheme consistent with the observed properties. Although our descriptive results are as a whole correctly predicted by Choe's and Farkas's theories, they include a number of noteworthy empirical details and bring out some contrasts between reduplication, described as a distributive-marking strategy in Georgian (Gil) and Hungarian (Farkas), and Share marking by a specialized pre-determiner, as instantiated in Albanian, under our own assumptions. This study should thus provide a basis for further theoretical and comparative works on distributivity and distributive marking in natural languages.

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