Sources of Nominal Number Markers

This chapter surveys a range of sources for nominal plurality markers including inflectional and derivational morphology – such as case markers and collective suffixes – plural pronominals, nouns of multitude ( group, herd ), expressions of alterity ( other(s) ), and quantifiers. Nominal plurality markers are a semantically, syntactically, or morphologically heterogenous class. In particular, additive plural markers affixed to the noun of the type found in English duck/ducks are not representative for many nominal plurality markers described in the literature. Nominal plural marking morphology can have different semantic and syntactic profiles and can develop separately for different parts of the nominal paradigm. The nominal plurality markers found cross‐linguistically differ in the range of readings they allow – additive, associative, similative, distributive, and collective readings – and in their placement in the noun phrase. In addition, in case‐marking languages, plural markers may be limited to certain case‐forms of the noun paradigm.