Plural marking on mass nouns

Abstract

Mass nouns are generally incompatible with plural morphology in number-marking languages. Greek mass nouns, though, can freely pluralize. Chapter 11 shows that the meaning of plural mass nouns in Greek is that of ‘spread over a surface in a disorderly way’. The author argues that plural morphology on mass nouns in the language is the spell-out of number features on the nominalizing head n, unlike plural morphology on count nouns, which spells out the head of the functional projection NumP. She extends this analysis to other languages with plural marking on mass nouns, and argues that plural morphology on mass nouns is never the spellout of features on Num, which can only have the meaning associated with regular plural morphology on count nouns cross-linguistically.

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