Structures for plurals

Abstract

This paper presents a hypothesis about the innermost structure of noun phrases, which aims at explaining the interaction of number and countability in nouns. This is based on a constructionist approach which views nouns as substructures of the noun phrase, and word formation and inflection as the morphological spellout of structures assembled and interpreted at an abstract syntactic level. It argues that nouns fundamentally identify entity types, and the rest of the DP specifies their denotation in part-structural and quantificational terms. This provides the framework for a new unified analysis of nouns like furniture, waters, and contents, where number and countability interact in a non-canonical way, which accounts for their morphology and their semantics.