[Lexicog] lexical entries as singulars or plurals

[billposer at ALUM.MIT.EDU]

Wayne,

I agree that it may be necessary to enter both the singular
and plural. There are several situations in which this may be
necessary. In addition to the one you mention in which the singular
is very rare, there are cases in which different numbers have different
meanings (perhaps in addition to the expected ones.)
In Carrier, "ear plugs", typically used as a pair,
is the dual of "hearing aid", typically used singly. (Both are
deverbal nouns meaning literally "thing that goes in the ear".)
When I studied Sanskrit, we learned that the dual of "father" means
"parents" while the plural means "spirits of one's ancestors".

Another situation might be one in which the noun exists only
in the plural form but is not treated grammatically as a plural.
Hebrew mayim "water" is an example (I think - I believe it behaves
like a singular but a bunch of people on this list will correct
me if I'm wrong.)

Yet another case is the one in which the relationship among
the number forms is irregular. If you give irregular forms
their own headword entry, you'll want to list all the number
forms. This is particularly true when the relationship is
highly irregular, e.g. Navajo asdzaan "woman", saani "women",
or Carrier t'et "young woman", t'edukoo "young women".

A related situation that I have encountered is one in which
the basic form of a noun is normally understood as a dual
and there exists a singulative form that can be used if one
wants to be clear that one is referring to a single member of the
pair. In Carrier this is true of nouns that naturally come in
pairs, such as "eye" and "hand". If you say /sna/ it will normally
be interpreted as "my eyes". If you are singling out one eye,
you say /snak'uz/ "my one eye", or "side of eye", if you like.
The suffix -k'uz is also used with single things that are considered
as consisting of two halves, e.g. a side of beef, or in Carrier
culture more commonly, a side of fish. (Treated as an inalienably
possessed noun, -k'uz means "a half, a side", and therefore 50 cents.)

Bill

--
Bill Poser, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/ billposer at alum.mit.edu


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