lexical plurals a morphosemantic approach may 2008

[...]... being part of lexical competence? Actually, we have already considered some cases where number is a lexicalized property on nouns that are not pluralia or singularia tantum; still, pluralia tantum might appear as a core case of lexical plurals In fact, pluralia (and singularia) tantum are convenient descriptive labels, but no more Being plural or singular is a grammatical property; but pluralia and singularia... Abbreviations pl plural pres present progr progressive prt particle rel relational (of Arabic nisba adjectives) sg singular singulat singulative that distal deictic V verb vpt verbal particle (in Breton) 1 Aims and assumptions 1.1 Lexical plurals as a morphosemantic concept This book is a study in the relation between grammar and lexical competence Its goal is to analyse how grammatical plurality can be an... plural category that can be lexical in this case Finally, Chapter 9 recapitulates the results from Part I and Part II into a concluding discussion of plurality between grammatical and lexical competence The latter involves knowledge of lexemes, stems, and a part-structure conceptualization Plurality may be part of all three, as an ingredient of nominality That is, I think, what it means to say that a. .. standard partitions instead of an undivided mass (wines  wine) However, plurality often means more than this grammatically regimented reading, and aVects the conceptualization inherent in the lexeme: waters does not mean ‘many a water’ in the waters of the lake, funds may mean ‘funding’ as opposed to ‘many a fund’, and looks may mean ‘human physical features’ rather than ‘many a look’ Again, only a cross-linguistic... Typology because *a clothe or *funs are not part of English in any of its current varieties What I claim is rather that everything interesting (linguistically signiWcant) that can be said about Wxed-number nouns can also be said about non-Wxednumber nouns—speciWcally, about all those which instantiate number as a lexical property Pluralia tantum are not a particular way to instantiate lexical plurality,... occasions, or names for games Some Russian examples are imeniny ‘name’s day’, zamorozki ‘light frosts’, pokhorony ‘funerals’ In Latin, we have festival names like saturnalia, the Wxed calendar dates idus, calendae, nonae, and occasions like feriae ‘holidays’ and nuptiae ‘nuptials’ (traditionally a sequence of events) Finally, in English and in many other languages plural is inherent on nouns that straddle... aqua  aquae, with a mass reading of the plural paralleled by many European languages (for water scattered in space or as Non-inXectional plurals 21 a name for the cosmic element), including the English water  waters Many abstract nouns occur both in singular and in plural, sometimes with the semantic eVect of manifold instantiation that is also relevant for pluralia tantum (these matters will be taken... editors David Adger and Hagit Borer, and to the linguistics editor John Davey and his assistant Karen Morgan, for helpful comments and expert editorial guidance This book is dedicated to absent friends Paolo Acquaviva Dublin, June 2008 Abbreviations #P quantity phrase 1, 2, 3 first, second, third person abstr abstract nominalization morpheme acc accusative adj adjective/adjectival affix asp aspect BP... with a noun The various types of lexical plurals justify a constructional approach to what it means to be a noun In this approach, the properties of nominality are distributed across distinct loci in a syntactic conWguration, rather than concentrated on an unanalysable N head Borer (2005) has argued that the number head contributes to determine the conceptual properties of a noun, in particular the granularity... in Chapter 4) Since the same uncertainty surrounds mass plurals of count singulars (dream  dreams), the plurals for which the status of plurale tantum is uncertain make up a sizeable group Hence, the boundaries of the class of pluralia tantum are signiWcantly blurred, and for principled reasons Finally, it is often unclear whether the lack of singular is a grammatical fact at all From a theoretical . non-inflectional plurals 11 2.1 Introduction 11 2.2 Lexical plurals 6¼ irregular plurals 11 2.3 Lexical plurals 6¼ semantically irregular plurals 13 2.4 Lexical plurals 6¼ pluralia tantum 15 2.5 Lexical. oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered. Christoph Schwarze, and Bjo ¨ rn Wiemer; and the students on my course at Stony Brook: Dianne Abrahams, Susana Huidobro, Jonathan Macdonald, Franc Marusic ´ , Anne Millar, and Roksolana Mykhaylykh. Thanks