Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 39, Issue 2, 2016

This paper presents a hypothesis about the innermost structure of noun phrases, which aims at explaining the interaction of number and countability in nouns. This is based on a constructionist approach which views nouns as substructures of the noun phrase, and word formation and inflection as the morphological spellout of structures assembled and interpreted at an abstract syntactic level. It argues that nouns fundamentally identify entity types, and the rest of the DP specifies their denotation in part-structural and quantificational terms. This provides the framework for a new unified analysis of nouns like furniture, waters, and contents, where number and countability interact in a non-canonical way, which accounts for their morphology and their semantics.

In this paper I provide a description and analysis of a small class of plural mass nouns in Telugu (Dravidian), as well as an overview of the major properties of the mass/count distinction in the language. The plural mass nouns show the semantic behaviour of mass nouns in Telugu, however, they show the morphosyntactic behaviour of count nouns. I provide an analysis whereby the plurality is inherent to the roots, and it is this inherent plurality interacting with other properties of the morphosyntax of Telugu that makes these nouns appear to be count on the surface, though in reality they are mass nouns.

L’objectif de cet article est de rendre compte des pluriels simples et doubles de l’arabe dans le cadre de la théorie des nominaux et de l’individuation de Borer (2005) . En particulier, nous étudions ces pluriels dans les constructions où l’accord entre le verbe et le pluriel est déviant et faisons quatre propositions  1) les pluriels internes sont féminins (et singuliers) à un niveau sous-jacent dans les contextes où l’accord est déviant, ne représentant donc pas, contrairement aux apparences, d’échec d’appariement ; 2) lorsque les pluriels internes s’accordent avec le verbe, une interprétation distributive ou collective est établie, et lorsque les pluriels internes ne s’accordent pas avec le verbe, seule l’interprétation collective peut être générée, résultat de la fonction atomisante du féminin que l’on retrouve indépendamment dans le contexte du singulatif ; 3) le pluriel interne féminin constitue la base des doubles pluriels, si bien que ces derniers font surface à un niveau supérieur dans la structure nominale, offrant donc un deuxième type de pluriel, pourvu d’une fonction comptable, alors que celui généré sous la tête Div a une fonction atomisante ; 4) les règles que nous décrivons sont tout à fait prévisibles et productives, ce qui laisse supposer que les pluriels étudiés dans notre article ne sont pas des pluriels lexicaux.

The aim of this paper is to account for single and double plurals of Arabic under Borer’s nominal theory of division (2005) . In particular, we study these plurals in constructions where the agreement between the verb and the plural is deflected and make four proposals : 1) broken plurals are feminine (and singular) at an underlying level in contexts where the agreement is deflected, thus not representing failure of agreement, contrary to appearances; 2) when the broken plurals agree with the verb, distributive or collective interpretations arise, and when the broken plurals do not agree with the verb, only the collective interpretation can be generated as a result of the atomizing function of the feminine gender that is independently found in the context of the singulative ; 3) the feminine broken plural constitutes the basis of the double plurals, so that the later surface at a higher level in the nominal structure, thus providing a second type of plural, with a counting function, while the plural generated under Div has an atomizing function; 4) the rules that we describe are quite predictable and productive, suggesting that the plurals studied in our paper are not lexical plurals.

Cette contribution s’intéresse aux pluriels lexicaux en français. Elle montre que les pluriels lexicaux sont toujours dans la portée de dérivations ultérieures qui restaurent le statut [+ comptable], comme cela ressort notamment de la présence de déterminants indéfinis fortement individualisants. Ces transferts s’avèrent reproduire certains transferts classiques entre massif et comptable comme le trieur et le conditionneur universels. Ce dernier donne lieu à différents effets de sens d’après la nature du nom qui sert d’input : délimitation dans l’espace tridimensionnel, délimitation temporelle, délimitation globale d’événements et d’objets complexes et conditionnement qualitatif. Dans certains cas, le transfert aboutit à la réfection du singulier au sein d’une nouvelle opposition grammaticale. Des opérations « au-delà » du pluriel massif confirment à la fois la pertinence structurelle de la classe des pluriels massifs et leur statut proprement massif (massif étant conçu ici à la fois comme ‘dense’ et ‘compact’).

This paper deals with lexical plurals in French. It shows that lexical plurals are still within the scope of derivations that restore a [+ count] status, as witnessed by the presence of strongly individuating indefinite determiners. These shifts appear to line up with two canonical mass>count transfers, viz. the universal sorter and the universal packager. The latter comes in various subtypes according to the nature of the input-noun: packaging in three-dimensional space, temporal bounding, spatio-temporal bounding of complex activities and objects and, finally, “qualitative” packaging. In some cases, even a novel singular count form shows up (Une rillette, s’il vous plaît!), restoring the canonical grammatical opposition. These operations beyond “plural mass” confirm both the structural relevance of mass plurals as a lexical class and their genuine ‘mass’ status (mass being conceived both as ‘dense’ and ‘compact’).

Mass superordinates such as clothing, clothes and furniture form a distinct and peculiar class of nouns in languages with an obligatory singular/plural distinction. These nouns often have pluralia-tantum variants as well as count equivalents – both within one linguistic system as well as cross-linguistically. This study is a follow-up of my earlier analysis of Romance superordinates ( Mihatsch, 2006 ). The data are taken from English, German, French and Spanish in order to demonstrate the striking cross-linguistic pattern. The highly variable Spanish ropa(s) ‘clothing/clothes’ is analysed in greater detail. I argue that in most cases the apparently unsystematic synchronic variants arise from partly unidirectional diachronic changes, namely a lexicalisation process leading from collective nouns to object mass nouns, often followed by the appearance of plural forms, which oscillate between a lexical and an inflectional plural.

The indefinite plural article uns in medieval French conjoins the features of unity and plurality. Because of its grammatical nature, uns is not restricted to lexical plurals, but combines in a productive way to nouns having a regular singular-plural alternation in order to create a complex referent not reducible to the sum of its components. Moreover, uns expresses not only quantitative unity ‘one single N’, but also qualitative unity ‘one same N’ and is not linked to lexical plurality in the latter case. Since its features of unity and plurality are considered as incompatible, plural indefinite articles have been assumed to emerge in an advanced stage of grammaticalization, when the numeral source meaning is bleached out, and to be not viable over time. Both hypotheses were invalidated in the present study.

This study uses meronymy and hyperonymy as semantic criteria applied to French collective nouns (CollNs) and lexical plural nouns (LPNs) in the issue of noun classification. After having outlined the semantic properties of CollNs and explained their links with meronymy and hyperonymy, LPNs are tested in different glosses related to these two relationships. These tests outline that CollNs and LPNs form two kinds of nouns that could hardly converge. They also enlighten the way the different subclasses of LPNs match with meronymy and hyperonymy.

This paper studies why, for a plurality of discrete entities, a non-count plural might be preferred over a count noun or a non-count singular. Building partly on Wierzbicka (1985 , 1988 ), it proposes two parameters: semantics, but also morphology. With lexical plurals, the items are construed as being of different kinds (vs. count nouns) and the focus is on the plurality of items rather than on a common purpose (vs. non-count singulars). For morphology, the notion of ‘attractor’ is proposed for some patterns which partly motivate the [±count] and number features. A collateral finding is that the plural of lexical plurals can be unstable: some nouns ending with -s undergo reanalysis as morphological plurals, while Latin plurals tend to be reanalysed as singulars. It is suggested that this trend confirms the semantic values of singular and plural numbers, as well as the influence of the morphological parameter on number and construal.

Cette étude porte sur les noms déverbaux d’événement à emploi pluriel majoritaire, et vise à déterminer si cette classe de noms présente des pluriels lexicaux (au sens de Acquaviva, 2008 ). Nous montrons, à la suite d’une étude sur le corpus du FrWac, que l’emploi pluriel majoritaire ne relève pas toujours de ce facteur. Toutefois, lorsque des pluriels lexicaux sont attestés, ils relèvent de plusieurs paramètres ; lorsque les noms sont performatifs, ils peuvent fonctionner comme des pluralia tantum. Pour les noms désignant des événements, la pluriactionnalité interne, lorsqu’elle n’est pas marquée formellement, est un facteur déterminant. Pour ceux qui n’en désignent pas, la pluralité lexicale est liée au fait que, comme généralement, les noms désignent des ensembles d’entités peu individuées.

This study focuses on deverbal nominals occurring mostly in the plural, in order to assess their status as lexical plurals ( Acquaviva, 2008 ). Our study, based on data from the FrWac, shows that the majority of plural uses does not imply lexical plurality. However, when this phenomenon is observed for event-denoting nominals, it relies either on the performative character of the noun, which behaves as a plurale tantum, or on internal pluractionality. When the nouns do not refer to events, lexical plurality depends on the fact that the entities referred to are conceived as weakly individuated.

Sign languages make use of paired articulators (the two hands), hence manual signs may be either one- or two-handed. Although two-handedness has previously been regarded a purely formal feature, studies have argued morphologically two-handed forms are associated with some types of inflectional plurality. Moreover, recent studies across sign languages have demonstrated that even lexically two-handed signs share certain semantic properties. In this study, we investigate lexically plural concepts in ten different sign languages, distributed across five sign language families, and demonstrate that such concepts are preferentially represented with two-handed forms, across all the languages in our sample. We argue that this is because the signed modality with its paired articulators enables the languages to iconically represent conceptually plural meanings.