Branching lexical plural into greater and paucal

Abstract

Lexical plural merges in or below the categorizing head n0. It often yields abundance in quantity, as in Greek and Innu-aimun. However, it is reported that it denotes paucity in quantity in one language, namely Telugu, to the best of the researcher’s knowledge. The current study reports that Jordanian Arabic has lexical plural that is semantically similar to the lexical plural in Telugu. Specifically, it yields paucity in quantity. From a typological perspective, this study calls for branching lexical plural into lexical greater as in Greek and Innu-aimun and lexical paucal as in Jordanian Arabic and Telugu, comparable to inflectional plural that may divide into greater, which gives abundance in quantity, and paucal, which yields paucity in number. This implies that languages that have the lexical plural category should fall into the following paradigm: languages with lexical greater and those with lexical paucal.

Keywords

• lexical plural
• lexical paucal vs. lexical greater
• paucity vs. abundance
• non-count nominals
• Jordanian Arabic