Pluralia Tantum in the Real World – On the inhomogeneity of their countability
classes
Tibor Kiss, Halima Husic, Francis Jeffry Pelletier
{tibor, husic}@linguistics.rub.de, [email protected]
Introduction
In this paper, we look at nouns that have been classified as pluralia tantum in grammars and
dictionaries. Although the name pluralia tantum suggests a unique classification with regard to the
count/mass distinction, we will show that the nouns fall into various classes of count and mass
nouns. Our analysis is based on a large annotation and classification task, which yielded BECL
(Bochum English Countability Lexicon, Kiss, Pelletier and Stadtfeld 2014), a sense-based
dictionary with fine-grained sub-classes of count and mass nouns.
1. Definitions of pluralia tantum in grammars and dictionaries
It is commonly assumed that nouns can be subdivided into count and non-count nouns, where count
nouns denote entities which can be counted whereas non-count nouns denote entities which cannot.
One important classification criterion for count nouns is their ability to pluralize. Non-count nouns
do not take part in this process. Beside this classification of nouns, some nouns seem not to be
applicable to the counting criteria and the category of number. Even though most nouns have
singular and plural forms, some of them have or occur only in one form. We will focus here on
those nouns which have only plural forms, plural-only nouns or pluralia tantum. Such nouns either
do not have a singular form at all (cattle, clothes) or do not have a singular form with an
interpretation that would be the singular of the meaning (glasses, greens).
Payne and Huddleston (2012) distinguish plural-only nouns with the –s ending from those without
an –s ending. Furthermore, they subdivide the plural-only nouns ending in –s into four categories:
(i) bipartites, (ii) plurals denoting substances consisting of particles, (iii) plurals denoting aggregates
of entities and (iv) plurals denoting areas containing a plurality of entities without clear boundaries.
The first category denotes objects which are made up of two like parts, such as names of articles of
clothing (bloomers, pyjamas), tools (clippers, cutters) or optical aids (glasses, binoculars).
Bipartites occur in constructions with pair of, such as two pairs of scissors. Hence, for counting the
entities the word pair has to be pluralized. The second category lacks a singular form and does not
occur with cardinal numerals and comparable quantifiers (e.g. oats, grits). The third category of
plurals comprises cover-terms for sets of entities such as clothes and goods. The heterogeneity of
the entities prevents counting. Finally, the fourth category seems to behave like ordinary count
nouns but also has non-count interpretations (She climbed two mountains in one day. (count) vs. She
lives in the mountains. (non-count) (cf. Payne and Huddleston 2012 p. 343.)). They note that some
plurals do not fall in one of the groups mentioned before, e.g. beginnings and holidays.
Plural-only nouns which do not end in –s are either loan words (genitalia, regalia) or just
uninflected plural-only nouns, such as cattle, police, folk, people etc. Those uninflected plural-only
nouns have a mass denotation even though some of them occur with high round numerals (a
thousand cattle, two hundred police) and low numerals (these three city folk, two people), and hence
can be counted. (cf. Payne and Huddleston 2012 p.345).
1
To provide the background for the case study in section 3, a detailed description of BECL will
follow. BECL provides countability classes for English nouns based on their senses.
2. BECL
The Bochum English Countability Lexicon provides countability classes for more than 10,000
English noun-sense pairs. BECL addresses two assumptions, which were made in previous
approaches to analyzing the count/mass distinction: i) The count/mass distinction can be analyzed
in binary fashion and ii) the count/mass distinction can be analyzed at the level of the noun lemma.
Both assumptions are considered to be wrong. Starting with the second assumption, BECL provides
analyses not at the level of the noun lemma, but at the level of the noun sense. The noun senses
have been taken from WordNet (Miller, 1995). By annotating noun-sense pairs, BECL distinguishes
between nouns with different senses that fall into the same countability class, and nouns with
different senses that fall into different countability classes.
The annotation of the nouns proceeded independently by at least two native speakers of (Canadian)
English. Each annotation was carried out for individual senses, noun-sense pairs were provided in
randomized fashion to the annotators.
The annotation of the noun senses did not consist of categorizing the noun senses as count or mass,
but rather of answering questions about the possibility of inserting the noun with a given sense into
a certain syntactic context followed for some questions by the semantic consequences of the
insertion. The answers based on syntactic contexts reveal syntactic properties of the annotated noun
sense.
2.1 The annotation
There are three basic patterns into which a noun can be inserted to get information about its
countability class membership. The three patterns are divided into pairs of two, where each pattern
may be answered affirmatively (such as grammatical), negatively (such as ungrammatical), or
finally by indicating that the pattern is not applicable for the noun.
Test I.1
Does inserting noun#x (where #x is the sense x of the noun) into NP1 VERB more NOUNsg
than NP2 lead to grammaticality, ungrammaticality, or is it not possible?
The noun car with its first sense (car#1, i.e. a motor vehicle with four wheels; usually propelled by
an internal combustion engine) leads to ungrammaticality, i.e. a negative answer. *John bought
more car than Bill. is not grammatical. Such a construction would imply the plural form of car, but
test I.1 requires the singular form of the noun.
Inserting noun senses like fruitcake#2 and lingerie#1 leads to grammaticality1. For instance, The
boy ate more fruitcake than the girl. is fully grammatical. In contrast, pluralia tantum are assumed
to lack the ability to be inserted in such a pattern, because they do not have a singular form, which
leads to the answer not applicable.
1
fruitcake#1 a rich cake containing dried fruit and nuts and citrus peel and so on; lingerie#1 women's underwear and
nightclothes
2
The second part, test I.2, holds for those noun senses which got an affirmative answer in test I.1. If
the insertion of the noun resulted in a grammatical sentence in the first step of this test pattern, the
annotator has to decide whether the comparison in the constructed sentence is based on the number
of entities (e.g., pieces in the case of lingerie#1), or on a different kind of measurement (e.g.,
mass/volume in the case of fruitcake#22). So, here we take number of entities to be the affirmative
answer, a different mode of measurement to be the negative answer, and in case the first pattern
leads to ungrammaticality or is simply not applicable, the answer to the second question will also be
not applicable.
Test II.1
Does inserting noun#x (where #x is the sense x of the noun) into NP1 VERB more NOUNpl
than NP2 lead to grammaticality, ungrammaticality, or is it not possible?
The second test is similar to the first one except for the number constraint on the noun. This time
the noun has to be pluralized. Car#1 led to ungrammaticality in test I.1, but it’s insertion in test II.1
is grammatical, e.g. John bought more cars than Bill. On the other hand, the insertion of lingerie#1
is not applicable, as it lacks a valid plural form. Some pluralia tantum are already in a plural form,
but they are not compatible with the quantifier more and thus lead to not applicable, e.g. Mary
bought more *lingeries than Anna.
Test II.2
Is the construction in test II.1 semantically equivalent to NP1 VERB more CLASSIFIER of
NOUNsg than B?
When test II.1 was answered affirmatively the annotators have to judge whether the construction in
test II.1 is semantically equivalent to a pattern with classifiers like types of, kinds of, etc. An
example of a noun passing II.1 and II.2 in this fashion is whiskey#1. He drank more whiskeys than
her is semantically equivalent to He drank more kinds/glasses of whiskey than her, thus for
whiskey#1 the answer to test II.2 will be equivalent. This means that the plural marking implies a
hidden classifier.
The third test is also twofold, with two syntactic contexts.
Test III.1
Test III.2
Is sentence of the form [NP Indef.Det. + NOUNsg] is {SOME PROPERTY OF NOUN}
grammatical?
Is sentence of the form [NP NOUNsg] is {SOME PROPERTY OF NOUN} grammatical?
The only difference in test III.1 and III.2 is the existence of the indefinite determiner in test III.1. As
for car#1 test III.1 should be answered affirmatively, while test III.2 leads to an ungrammatical
construction. Compare A car is a vehicle. and *Car is a vehicle. As for whiskey#1, the pattern in test
III.2 leads to a grammatical construction, e.g. Whiskey is a drinkable liquid and contains alcohol. A
similar construction with an indefinite article would be #A whiskey is a glass filled with whiskey,
but this construction would not be a valid test sentence since the constraint of inserting a property of
the noun is not satisfied and instead a classifier is used.
2.2 The resulting countability classes
The initial version of BECL contained annotations for about 15,000 noun-sense pairs. If the
annotations (i.e. the answers to the three tests) are taken as features (affirmative, negative, not
2
This second step mirrors the experimental results provided in (Barner & Snedeker, 2005 and Bale & Barner, 2009).
3
applicable), a feature space of 36 = 729 possibly classes is allowed, but since certain answers are
interdependent (as answering not applicable to the first question of a pair will only allow answering
not applicable to the second question of the pair), the space is actually reduced to 80 classes.
Binning the annotations into classes has resulted in a total of 18 classes, comprising 10,667
annotated noun-sense pairs. A countability class in BECL is defined as follows: A class consists of
at least one noun that has received the same answers by at least two annotators. Hence a class is one
particular pattern picked from the 80 possible ones. Class 235 – to give an illustration – has the
pattern no, not applicable, yes, not equivalent, yes, no. According to the consequences of the
answers in certain tests the 18 classes form four distinct groups:
regular count senses: (8042)
regular mass senses: (1903)
Class
name
235
721
371
73
Pattern
Sum
(N, NA, Y, -Eq, Y, N)
(N, NA, Y, -Eq, Y, Y)
(NA, NA, Y, NA, NA,
NA)
(N, NA, Y, -Eq, N, N)
8025
7
7
Class
name
528
519
531
Pattern
Sum
(Y, -Num, NA, NA, N, Y)
(Y, -Num, N, NA, N, Y)
(Y, Num, NA, NA, N, Y)
1866
25
12
3
senses that are both mass and count: (480)
senses that are neither mass nor count: (242)
Class
name
510
726
729
513
Class
name
523
37
190
514
199
28
353
Pattern
Sum
(Y, -Num, Y, Eq, N, Y)
(Y, -Num, Y, -Eq, Y, Y)
(Y, Num, Y,-Eq, Y, Y)
(Y, Num, Y, Eq, N, Y)
314
162
3
1
Pattern
Sum
(N, NA, NA, NA, N, Y)
(N, NA, NA, NA, N, N)
(N, NA, N, NA, Y, N)
(N, NA, N, NA, N, Y)
(N, NA, NA, NA, Y, N)
(N, NA, N, NA, N, N)
(NA, NA, N, NA, NA, NA)
146
59
11
9
9
4
4
As for the class names, the numerical names are artifacts from the analysis of the annotations in R
(http://cran.r-project.org/). Class 235 could be called fully countable, but such a simple explanation
cannot be provided for each class, hence the numbers are used as representatives for each class.
For the grouping of the classes in four major categories answers of the test patterns in test I.1 and
test II.1 were responsible. For instance, if the answer to test pattern I.1 – as provided in (1) – is yes
(i.e. Y in the table), then this sense is likely to be a “mass” sense – although there are some caveats
to be made about this. If the answer is no (i.e. N) or not applicable (i.e. NA) then it is likely not to
be a “mass” sense. If the answer to test pattern II.1 (“Can the noun-sense be pluralized?”) is yes,
then this sense is likely to be a “count” sense – again with some caveats. If the answer to this is not
applicable then it is likely not to be a “mass” sense. On this basis the 18 resulting classes were
divided. Group regular count comprises classes in which test I.1 is NA or N and test II.1 is Y.
Group regular mass are classes with Y in test I.1 and N or NA in test II.1. 480 noun senses had
affirmative answers in both tests, test I.1 and test II.1, and hence are categorized as being both count
and mass. On the other hand, several noun-sense pairs received N or NA in both tests, test I.1 and
II.2. Such noun senses are treated as neither count nor mass.
4
3. A case study
In spite of the differences between plural-only nouns, all of them have in common that they do not
have a (matching) singular form. How does this affect their countability preference? Do such nouns
tend to be like non-count nouns, because the counting does not apply since they already have a
plural nature or the pluralization needs to be applied on some other word (e.g. on some classifier)?
Since the literature on pluralia tantum gives no indication whether to identify such nouns as being
count or mass, we conducted a case study on the countability classes of English pluralia tantum.
Our aim was to extract plural only nouns with the given senses and observe how these nouns are
distributed in the countability classes of BECL.
The recognition of pluralia tantum is not simple, since no labeling of pluralia tantum is given in
BECL and there is no straightforward method to detect them automatically. Our first try was to look
up the noun senses in those countability classes where test I.1 could not be applied. We assumed
that pluralia tantum would commonly receive a NA in this test because of the lack of a singular
form. Only two out of 18 BECL classes provide a NA in test I.1. These are class 371 (regular count)
and class 353 (neither mass nor count). Since these classes are not very frequent, we found only 10
noun senses: ancients#1, clutches#1, throes#1, whereabouts#1, bowels#1, eaves#, leftovers#1,
literati#1, manners#1, remains#1 and specific#13.Most of them are clear cases of pluralia tantum,
but we were not satisfied with only ten nouns senses out of more than 10,000.
In our next try we included CELEX (Baayen et al. 1993), an online dictionary providing a
classification of nouns into countable and uncountable, as well as into pluralia tantum and
collectives. In CELEX the majority of pluralia tantum (772 out of 881) are classified as being
neither countable nor uncountable. We extracted those pluralia tantum and matched them with the
nouns provided in an expanded version of BECL, containing more noun senses, namely those
which were first annotated differently by two annotators but got an adjudicated annotation in a
second step.
The study resulted in 34 noun-sense pairs which appear in three groups of classes:
regular count
class noun senses
235
military#1, staff#2
371
regular mass
class
noun senses
528
kin#1, kin#2,
riches#1, staff#4,
viscera#1
519
progeny#1,
staff#1, staff#3
bowels#1, briefs#1, damages#1, eaves#,
forceps#1,leftovers#1, literati#1, manners#1,
papers#1, proceedings#1, proceeds#1, remains#,
scissors#1, shades#1, stays#1,workings#1,
workings#2
531
neither mass nor count
class
noun senses
28
dead#2
353
annals#1,
clutches#1,o
utskirts#1,
throes#1
clergy#1, dead#1
Table 1: Countability classes of pluralia tantum
As Table 1 indicates, plural-only nouns fall into seven different countability classes, which belong
to three major groups: i) regular count, ii) regular mass and iii) neither mass nor count.
3
Searches for senses can be carried out under http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn.
5
The group of regular count noun senses contains plural-only nouns with and without –s ending, loan
words, nominalizations and other types of plural-only nouns. Given that BECL has a sense-based
approach to countability, we see that the word workings with both given senses is assigned a
countability class from the group of regular count classes4. On the contrary, the different senses of
staff do not fall in the same countability class. Staff#1 and staff#3 belong to the regular mass group
while staff#2 is regular count5. Although the lemma gives rise to being classified as a plural-only
noun, the sense of a strong rod or stick with a specialized utilitarian purpose seems to be clearly
singular. Likewise, the senses of dead are assigned different countability classes. While dead#1 is
classified as regular mass, dead#2 is assigned a countability class which is neither mass nor count6.
The majority of noun senses of these pluralia tantum nouns that are in the regular mass group
represents uninflected plural-only nouns which denote a certain group of people. Of particular
interest is the third group. Those noun senses are classified as being not countable and not mass.
Four of them have a plural marking but in contrast to workings and bowels they are not countable.
Conclusion
Following the results of our case study, it seems appropriate to deny that pluralia tantum is a
unified phenomenon with respect to the mass/count distinction. The study has revealed three major
divisions of pluralia tantum (mass, count, neither mass nor count).
Clearly the present study must be broadened and deepened. It must be broadened to include more
candidates for pluralia tantum. This would also allow a statement about the distribution of pluralia
tantum among the subclasses. In addition, the conspicuous lack of pluralia tantum in the fourth
subclass (both mass and count) could be addressed by a larger data set.
It must be deepened since eventually, we would like to identify unique semantic properties, which
lead to the subclassification, and yields further insights into the count/mass distinction in general.
References:
Baayen, R. H., Piepenbrock, R. and van Rijn, H. (1993). The CELEX lexical data base on CDROM.
Payne, John and Rodney Huddleston (2012) “Nouns and Noun Phrases” in R. Huddleston and G.K.
Pullum The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (5th Ed.), pp. 323-523. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Kiss, T., Pelletier, F.J. and Stadtfeld, T. (2014). Building a Reference Lexicon for Countability in
English. In Proceedings of LREC 2014. Reykjavik, Iceland.
Miller, G. A. (1995). WordNet: A Lexical Database for English. Communications of the ACM Vol.
38, No. 11: 39-41.
4
workings#1 the internal mechanism of a device; workings#2 a mine or quarry that is being or has been worked
staff#1 personnel who assist their superior in carrying out an assigned task; staff#2 a strong rod or stick with a
specialized utilitarian purpose; staff#3 the body of teachers and administrators at a school
6
dead#1 people who are no longer living; dead#2 a time when coldness (or some other quality associated with death) is
intense
5
6