Number Marking

2.1.3.1 Number Marking Cross-Linguistically

There are several means of number marking, covering all the potential levels for such a function—lexical means (e.g., quantifiers like some, a few and special plu-ral words), morphological means like affixation, stem change and reduplication, morphophonological means (tone), and syntactic means like clitics (for a typolog-ical overview see Corbett, 2000; Dryer, 2005). In Dryer’s (2005) sample contain-ing nearly thousand languages, affixation is by far the most common way of plural marking, with the majority of plural affixes being suffixes (cf. Table 2.1).

Table 2.1: Distribution of Plural Marking strategies in Dryer’s (2005) Sample (N = 957)

mean N languages (examples)

Plural prefix 118 Xhosa, Zulu, Mohawk, Cherokee

Plural suffix 495 most European languages (including English and German), many African languages (e.g., Hausa), Persian

Stem change 5 Laal, Dinka, Nuer (all African),

Tiipay and Maricopa (North America)

Plural tone 2 Ngiti and Gworok (both African)

Complete stem reduplication 8 Indonesian, Muruwari, Djaru

Mixed morphological means 34 Irish, many Arabic varieties, various Berber languages (e.g., Berber, Tuareg)

Plural clitic 59 Mbay, Cayuvava, Sinaugoro, Ewe

Plural word 150 Chamorro, Wolof, Tagalog, Khmer

no (nominal) plural 89 Malagasy, Japanese, Choctaw

In addition to the type of marker, it is noteworthy whether or not a marker exclu-sively expresses plural or some other inflectional features as well. This question is particularly evident for affixation and concerns the distinction of agglutination versus flexion/fusion.¹⁰ Agglutination strings together affixes with distinct mean-ings in a transparent way whereas flexion fuses distinct inflectional features into a single morpheme (for further differences see Haspelmath, 2009; Plank, 1999;

Plungian, 2001; Pöchtrager et al., 1998). While Humboldt introduced this dis-tinction for the typological classification of languages (agglutinative languages are for example Turkish and Klingon, a language spoken on Qo’noS (Okrand, 1992), while German is a prototypical inflectional/fusional language),

morpholog-10’Flexion’ is the term that Humboldt originally introduced (Humboldt, 1836). Another com-monly used term is ’fusion’.

ical processes within a language do not necessarily behave uniformly with respect to this distinction.

2.1.3.2 Number Marking in German

Since German is the language of the upcoming experiments, it deserves a bit more attention. German is one of the languages that combine stem change (umlaut) and plural suffixes. In contrast to English, German has a variety of plural allomorphs (shown in Table 2.2).¹¹ In addition to the native inventory of plural markers, Ger-man has several loan words with specific plural forms, often originated in the donor language (e.g., Album/Alben (‘album(s)’), Bolschewik/Bolschewiki (‘Bol-shevik(s)’), Genus/Genera (‘gender(s)’), Kaktus/Kakteen (‘cactus/cactes’)).¹²

Table 2.2: Plural Markers in German

marker example

Ø Tiger (‘tiger(s)’), Igel (‘hedgehog(s)’) Ø + umlaut Vögel (‘birds’)

-e Hund-e (‘dogs’), Krokodil-e (‘crocodiles’) -e + umlaut Frösch-e (‘frogs’), Mäus-e (‘mice’) -er Rind-er (‘oxes/cows’)

-er + umlaut Würm-er (‘worms’), Hühn-er (‘chicken’) -n Schnecke-n (‘snails’), Auster-n (‘oysters’) -en Bär-en (‘bears’), Papagei-en (‘parrots’) -s Kakadu-s (‘cockatoos’), Zebra-s (‘zebras’)

The number of German plural allomorphs differs in the literature, ranging from nine (e.g., Wegener, 1992) to three (Wiese, 2000; Wunderlich, 1999) mainly de-pending on whether or not umlaut and schwa are considered to be part of the plural morpheme. Ignoring umlaut and schwa takes into account that umlaut and schwa-epenthesis are independent phonological processes in German (cf. Wiese, 1987, 2000). Umlaut is obligatory, if possible,¹³ for -er plural, in all other cases,

11The list in Table 2.2 might not be exhaustive. A further plural allomorph seems to be -ten as pointed out to me by Josef Bayer. But I am only aware of one noun which forms the plural with -ten—Bau-ten ‘buildings’. A reverse search for nouns ending in a vowel or diphthong in the online dictionary provided by the Institute for German Language (http://www.owid.de) revealed no further examples, except derivations and compounds containing -bau. Possibly, -ten is an instance of -(e)n with additional -t- epenthesis for phonological reasons.

12The more integrated a loan becomes the more often it ends up with a regular plural marker (e.g., Albums, Bolschwiken, Kaktusse) although purists consider these as false forms.

13Umlaut can occur when the last vowel is /a/, /a:/, /o/, /o:/, /u/, /u:/ or /au/. Schwa does not count as the last vowel: Mutter/Mütter exhibits an umlaut although /u/ is not the last vowel in a

the lexical entry must include the information whether or not the stem undergoes umlaut. Mugdan (1977) assumes a feature "PL-UL" that indicates that the plural stem exhibits an umlaut.

It is hard to decide which of the plural allomorphs is the regular default. In fact, Bybee (1991) argued that German plural formation has no regular default.

Other authors give a list of rules each with an even longer list of exceptions (e.g., Duden, 2006; Mugdan, 1977). Nevertheless, there are certain morphosyntactic and phonological regularities of plural formation (see for instance Bittner, 1994;

Eisenberg, 1998; Golston and Wiese, 1995), but there are considerable idiosyn-crasies. With respect to frequency, the German plural allomorphs are not equally distributed. The most frequent suffix is -(e)n—with regard to type frequency as well as with regard to token frequency (Bartke et al., 2005; Bartke, 1998; Clahsen et al., 1996; Köpcke, 1988; Marcus et al., 1995; Sonnenstuhl-Henning, 2003, most frequency data are based on the CELEX databank, cf. Baayen et al., 1993).

While plural -s is of non-native origin (cf. Augst, 1975; Öhmann, 1961) and occurs only with a few native common nouns (e.g., Mädels ‘girls’),¹⁴ it differs from the other non-native plural allomorphs in that it is used as a default when no other plural morpheme is possible (cf. Marcus et al., 1995; Mugdan, 1977).

Plural formation with -s is possible in various phonological environments: It occurs after vowels (Zebras ‘zebras’), as well as after consonants (Details ‘de-tails’), both in stressed and in unstressed syllables. Despite its non-native origin and low frequency, many researchers identify -s as the default plural allomorph (e.g., Cahill and Gazdar, 1999; Kilbury, 2001; Marcus et al., 1995; Sonnenstuhl-Henning, 2003), at least in the peripheral lexicon (e.g., Neef, 1998).¹⁵ Although loan words prefer in general -e and -(e)n plural formation, there seems to be a tendency for newly borrowed loans to start with -s plural (Köpcke, 1993). Psy-cholinguistic experiments show that -s is preferred when applied to a nonsense word, in particular when the latter does not rhyme with any existing word (Bartke et al., 1995; Köpcke, 1988, 1993; Marcus et al., 1995) and from acquisition stud-ies showing that -s is massively overgeneralized in child language (Bartke, 1998;

Clahsen et al., 1992).¹⁶ Neurolinguistic evidence suggesting that -s is the default plural marker comes from studies comparing brain responses to various incorrect plural forms (Weyerts et al., 1997) and from aphasia studies (e.g., Penke, 1998).

strict sense (cf. Mugdan, 1977).

14Plural -s occurs also with proper names (including product names like Golfs), onomatopoetic words like Wauwaus (‘dogs’, literally ‘woof woofs’), acronyms like Demos (‘demonstrations’), lexicalized phrases like Dreikäsehochs (‘titches’, literally ‘three cheeses high’) and other nomi-nalizations.

15A list of criteria is provided in Marcus et al. (1995).

16For further psycholinguistic evidence for -s being the default plural allomorph see Marcus et al. (1995) and Sonnenstuhl-Henning (2003).

Note that the German plural allomorphs include zero-marking which results in number ambiguous nouns. The number of nouns which have identical forms in the singular and the plural is substantial. Nouns derived by the derivational suf-fix -er are regularly number ambiguous (e.g., Lehrer ‘teacher(s)’). Such number ambiguous nouns are usually disambiguated by agreement of the determiner as in (9) and/or other agreement targets, e.g., the verb in (10).

(9) a. der

A recent study investigating the processing of number ambiguous NPs like Peters Lehrer in subject function indicates that the parser commits itself to a particu-lar number value immediately when encountering the ambiguous NP (cf. Bader and Häussler, 2009). When later the parser’s decision is disconfirmed by verb agreement, processing disruptions follow. Note that although the commitment to a certain number value is semantic in nature since nominal number is first and foremost a semantic feature, it has syntactic consequences in particular for subject–verb agreement. Therefore, the choice of a number value can be con-sidered a necessary decision in the sense of the Minimal Semantic Commitment Hypothesis (Frazier et al., 1999).

Another type of systematic number ambiguity occurs with masculine nouns forming the plural with -en. In this case the number ambiguity is coupled with a case ambiguity. Since the masculine determiner shows the same ambiguity be-tween accusative-singular and dative-plural the ambiguity remains in definite NPs unless number is fixed by help of a numeral. This is illustrated in (11).

(11) a. Wir

In summary, German marks plural by means of affixation and stem change (um-laut). The number of plural-allomorphs is impressive. Even though their distribu-tion is not completely random, plural marking shows a number of idiosyncrasies.

And, as a consequence of the high syncretism in German, number ambiguity is a common phenomenon.