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Pluralia tantum nouns are fascinating due to their defective nature, semantic predictability, and need for repair. two aspect sand out: Firstly, Slavonic languages offer semantic classes and reassess the semantic naturalness of paired objects being pluralia tantum. Secondly, the claim for the semantic naturalness of paired objects being pluralia tantum needs reassessing. These nouns deserve continued attention for Slavonic internal and general linguistic reasons.
Abstract
Pluralia tantum nouns are indeed fascinating, and Slavists’ interest in them goes back to Braun’s thesis (1930) and earlier. There are several reasons for this. First, many of these nouns are defective, since they are countable yet they lack a singular. Second, while defectives typically involve sporadic gaps (as with Russian genitive plural *mečt for many speakers), sets of pluralia tantum nouns are often semantically predictable, at least in part (they are subject to ‘middle-size generalizations’, Koenig 1999). This predictability is limited, however: compare Russian binokl ‘binoculars’ (which is a normal noun) with sani ‘sleigh’ a plurale tantum noun. Third they often require some sort of repair (such as the use of collective numerals) so that they can be treated as count nouns. Pluralia tantum nouns are of continued interest in the general linguistic literature (see, for instance, Wisniewski 2009), hence it is timely to consider the particular interest and contribution of the Slavonic data, the focus of this paper. Two aspects stand out. First the Slavonic languages provide semantic classes of these nouns, which vary across the family in interesting ways. And second, the claim for the semantic naturalness of paired objects being pluralia tantum needs reassessing, given that these nouns are pluralia tantum even when the dual is available (as in Slovene and Upper and Lower Sorbian. Moreover, in these languages pluralia tantum nouns can be used for one, two, or more than two referents (as in Lower Sorbian, Janaš 1976/1984). Thus these nouns deserve our continued attention, both for Slavonic internal and for general linguistic reasons.
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