ИСТИНА

Animacy Hierarchy was introduced as a cross-grammatical factor which governs, in different languages, widespread splits of nominal categories, including case or number marking. Among other phenomena, Animacy Hierarchy has been invoked to describe the lexical distribution of associative plurals (APL). In this paper I argue that APL as an interpretation of nominal plurality is motivated not by the high position the respective noun holds on the Animacy Hierarchy but is a combined effect of coercion by the unique reference inherent to proper names and associative links easily recoverable for human referents. Interpretation of APL relies upon activation of set relations its referent holds to other entities in the speech act or in the speech participants’ minds. APL is thus argued to be an indexical rather than a functional semantic category.