The Korean plural marker tul can be used in a peculiar way. It can not only attach to a nominal expression functioning as a usual plural marker, but it can also, rather unusually, attach to other types of phrasal category. Semantically, when used in the latter way, it brings to the discourse context a sense of distributivity which is rather weak – weak to the extent that truth conditions are sometimes unaffected by its presence. In this article, I derive these properties of extrinsic tul from two proposals: (i) extrinsic tul comes with a silent anaphoric element; and (ii) it conventionally implicates the existence of a distributive relation between the host phrase of tul and its plural antecedent.
1. Introduction: intrinsic vs. extrinsic plural marker
2. Challenges: Distributivity Puzzles
3. Proposal
4. Analysis
6. Conclusion