Lexical Plurals

This book explores the wide variety of cases in which the plural of nouns is lexical. When a plural is lexicalized it becomes part of what it is to know a word: pence, for example, is lexical because it means a plurality of a certain kind - a multiple value, not a set of physical objects like pennies. Languages exhibit countless examples of similar word-dependent irregularities in the form and meaning of plural, but these have never been analyzed in depth from a unified perspective. Dr Acquaviva aims to do just that, using analytic tools from formal semantics and theoretical morphology to shed light on the relation between grammar and the lexicon.