Aggregate nouns in the plural are uncountable: Evidence from German

Abstract

Nouns like rice and sand denote aggregates, i.e., pluralities of objects typically situated in great proximity. Aggregates may be encoded not only as a singular mass noun (rice), but also by nouns in the plural (onions, peas). It has been argued that the difference in grammatical form indicates a difference in meaning: Individuals in the denotation of a plural aggregate-denoting noun are more cognitively salient and disjoinable than individuals in the denotation of the singular mass form. In this paper, I present results of corpus studies of plural aggregate-denoting nouns in German which do not confirm this assumption. My findings rather suggest that there is no difference in meaning between aggregate plurals and aggregate mass nouns since both may occur in the same “mass” contexts, and the interpretation of plural in such contexts differs from the interpretation of the ordinary count plural. I use means of mereotopology to formally capture this difference.