Collectives, object mass nouns and individual count nouns: Nouns between lexical and inflectional plural marking

Abstract

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.