The structure of plural last names in Spanish and other languages

Abstract

An associative plural functional head is proposed for Spanish plural last names. Spanish plural last name noun phrases appear with a plural determiner and a singular or plural noun. Last names marked as singular are interpreted as a group, whereas plural ones are interpreted as collection of individuals (additive reading), although both pattern like fully plural DPs. Based on a comparison with first names, I propose that last names involve a null nominal head that encodes the meaning ‘group’, dominated by an plural category, which is realized as the plural morpheme on the determiner. When the last name is plural, a second plural-like category NUM head, located in the lower part of the structure and shared with common nouns, forces the additive reading. The last name number patterns are shown to be similar to those of N-N compounds, this parallelism is derived from a common underlying semantic predication, realized as a relator phrase. The paper also surveys crosslinguistic pluralization patterns, proposing potential patterns of variation: the presence/absence of the null nominal and the structural location of the associative plural head.

Keywords

• DP
• agreement
• proper names
• relator phrase
• syntax
• Spanish