Ana Bosnic: The question of po – strengthening or weakening of a distributive marker?

Ana Bosnic: The question of po – strengthening or weakening of a distributive marker?

Serbian distributive marker po is commonly classified as a Distributive Share marker, that is, a marker that is associated with the argument that is being distributed (Choe 1987, Gil 1995). Recent research on Serbian po by Knežević (2015) suggested that the marker may not function as a true distributive universal quantifier, but rather as an event plurality marker (a pluractional) without additional universal properties of quantifiers. Further research by Bosnić (2021), however, revealed a more complex understanding of Serbian po. Namely, po is sometimes interpreted as a universal quantifier, which in this case means that the Distributive Key (the argument that is being distributed over, i.e. the restrictor of the quantifier) has to be exhausted. But in other instances, po behaves as an event plurality marker and does not need to exhaust its Distributive Key/restrictor. These two populations of speakers were identified in a study that focused on testing the exhaustivity requirement of a Distributive Key associated with po, and the conclusion was that po may be going through a semantic change. The key question that remains is the direction of this change. Is the default interpretation of po that of a weak plurality marker that gets strengthened to a universal quantifier, or vice versa? We explore implications of this study and discuss potential future (experimental) research aimed at addressing these lingering questions.

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