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Article published In:
Lexical plurals and beyond
Edited by Peter Lauwers and Marie Lammert
[Lingvisticæ Investigationes 39:2] 2016
► pp. 289–308

Collectives, object mass nouns and individual count nouns

Nouns between lexical and inflectional plural marking

| Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen |
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.
Keywords: object mass nouns, collective nouns, lexical plural, inflectional plural, lexicalisation
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.The conceptual domains of OMNs and the variability of their near-synonyms
  • 2.The variants of superordinates
    • 2.1Spatio-temporally bounded collective nouns
    • 2.2Object mass nouns (OMNs)
    • 2.3Between OMNs with a lexical plural and inflected individual count nouns
    • 2.4Individual count nouns
  • 3.Conceptual synchronic and diachronic links between the variants
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Author queries
  • References
Published online: 30 March 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/li.39.2.05mih
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