[Lexicog] lexical entries as singulars or plurals

[David Frank]

Bill Poser wrote:

...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.)

from David Frank:

What you reported for Carrier stirred up in my memory something very similar in St. Lucian French Creole (though St. Lucian is much less complex grammatically than Carrier). The word soulyé means 'shoe' or 'shoes'. Most nouns can be unspecified in number as long as the NP is not definite. So if you say, I volé soulyé mwen, that could mean "He/she stole my shoe" or "He/she stole my shoes." The number is not specified. If you attach a definite article to the noun, then you have to specify singular or plural.

In our dictionary, we also have the word koté. The first sense of that word is 'side' and the second is 'half of a pair (of shoes, socks, etc.)' The example sentence is An dansé-a i té pwen yon koté soulyé tifi-a, "At the danse he had taken one of the girl's shoes." In this context, where the definite article is not attached to the word for "shoe," to make it clear that only one of the girl's two shoes is being referred to, you literally say, "he took one side [of the pair] of the girl's shoes."
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