Lexical plurals for aggregates of discrete entities in English

Abstract

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.

Corpus-Based Investigation of S-V Concord Patterns of Nouns with Latin Plural Endings

“…The final nouns in the group, insignia and media, seem to have already been reclassified by native speakers as singular, similar to the reclassification that Huddleston and Pullum (2002) said happened to agenda and candelabra. This partly confirms the observation that nouns with plural endings are reanalyzed as plurals by English speakers (Gardelle, 2016). Of the two, it seems that the tendency is the strongest in the use of media across the three primary verbs.…”

“…In addition, the plurality of these nouns is notional and not morphological, and this notional plurality is a source of difficulties, if not mistakes, on the part of learners (Humphreys & Bock, 2005). Since these nouns cannot be split into stem + plural inflection, there is a tendency for speakers to treat them as non-count singular nouns (Gardelle, 2016) because the -s (plural) inflection that can help the online processing of the plurality meaning of these words is not present unlike in the case of regular nouns such as boys. Thus, the absence of this inflection leads speakers to treat these nouns as singular.…”

“…Like the explanations proffered for the first group of nouns, the singular treatment of media and insignia might have been due to the reclassification of these nouns in the minds of English speakers. This reclassification can be because the plurality of these nouns is not encoded morphologically unlike other English nouns such as boy-boys as explained by Gardelle (2016). Because notional and morphological plurality can be a source of confusion (Humphreys & Bock, 2005), it is not unsurprising that English users reclassified these nouns as singular despite their original plural meaning.…”

Are there any collective nouns among lexical plurals in English?

“…More generally, further research is needed for furniture nouns in the light of the present study. They, too, denote pluralities of entities, and they are closely related to lexical plurals, with pairs such as clothes / clothing , or furniture / furnishings , as well as cases of reanalysis of plurals as singulars (e.g., memorabilia , more rarely cattle ) or vice versa (e.g., kitchenware(s) ) (Gardelle 2016b: 359).…”

Pluralia tantum nouns and the theory of features: a typology of nouns with non-canonical number properties

“…Since the canonical use of number is compositional, as in this criterion, the various types of lexical plurals are all non-canonical; see Acquaviva (2008Acquaviva ( , 2016a, Gardelle (2016), Lammert (2016) and Lauwers and Lammert (2016), among others. This criterion gives no reason to expect that the values should be anything other than "equal", and hence equally distributed.…”