Number and Individuation: Nominal Semantics in Dagaare

Languages dispose of a variety of means for classifying and counting different types of objects present in the world. An instance is the much discussed mass-count distinction. In English, count nouns (dog, chair) allow plural marking and modification by cardinal quantifiers (two) and by determiners implicating plurality (several); mass terms (water, sand) do not permit plural marking, nor the quantifiers or determiners of count nouns, but may allow modification by much or a lot of. Fundamental questions about this distinction are still largely controversial and unanswered: which properties of a referent are related to different grammatical realizations of nominals within a language, e.g. permitting pluralization, and how does the relation between properties of the nominal referents and grammatical expression vary across languages? For many types of entities, languages largely agree on what types of entities are countable and those which are not—for instance, nouns referring to liquids cross-linguistically do not permit typical plural marking or plural interpretations while nouns referring to humans do. Between the two poles of canonically countable and canonically uncountable entities, there is rich variation across languages as to what number marking is available for a certain class of entities and how grammatical number is realized, for instance, nouns with collective reference (foliage, hair) and nouns referring to superordinate categories (furniture, silverware). A systematic understanding of different ontological types of objects, their attendant properties and the relation to different manners of linguistic representation across languages is a fertile area for research, and largely under-explored in comparison to comparable research on events. The central hypothesis guiding the project is that the morphological realization of number is sensitive to the meaning conveyed by the noun. In particular, the realization of number is sensitive to conceptual and perceptual factors, falling under the cover term individuation, which characterizes the propensity for an entity to appear as an individual unit. The notion of individuation has been explored from a variety of perspectives in the philosophical, linguistic and psycholinguistic literatures (Quine 1960; Mufwene 1980; Bloom 1994; Middleton et al. 2004 inter alia); building on these accounts, individuation is here proposed to operate in a scalar fashion, influencing the realization of grammatical number across the lexicon in the categorization of terms as mass or count, and additionally as collectives, which is common cross-linguistically for insects and vegetables/grains/fruits, as well as influencing the preference for occurring in the plural or singular, for instance, “ribs” and “nose”, respectively. This hypothesis connects to two broad themes at the center of theoretical research on grammatical number: (i) the characterization of mass as opposed to count terms and (ii) the meaning (and semantic representation) of the plural as opposed to the singular. The grammatical number system of Dagaare (Southern Gur; Niger-Congo), whose morphology appears sensitive to different degrees of individuation, provides an ideal resource for increasing understanding of these issues. The basic paradigm of Dagaare’s nominal system is a rare type of number marking known as “inverse” or “polarity” number marking (Baerman 2007), shown in (1). The words ‘child’ and ‘seed’ form a near minimal pair where both nouns share the same stem, yet the morpheme -ri marks the plural interpretation for ‘child’ and the singular interpretation for ‘seed’. Grimm (2009a) showed this pattern is governed by individuation, connecting to subtle but pervasive semantic principles underpinning the crosslinguistic realization of number systems.