Talk:Plurale tantum/Archive 1

Do plurale tantum really require measure words?

• What about "cattle"? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Palaverist (talk • contribs) 03:23, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

donatj

• Scissors isn't plural, its an action. They Scissor. Imagine a kine, we could call a knife stabs and it wouldn't be plural 03:38, 23 April 2006 USer:74.33.25.248
• Ummm... What? "Scissors" names the physical artifact. They cut is what they do. Besides, the entire point of a Plurale Tantum is that it is plural in structure and used with plural pronouns and conjugations- no less, no more.

Nentuaby 00:31, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

What is a "noun which appears only in the singular"?

In my vocabulary, "dust" is a mass noun. Therefore neither singular nor plural. OTOH the article at the moment is to the effect that you can have "a dust", just not "dusts".

There are, however, nouns that can be understood as referring to one single object, such as "sun" and "universe". But do these (in their usual meanings anyway) actually exist only in the singular from a linguistic POV? --Smjg 20:50, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

No, and there are many suns in the galaxy and many parallel universes in your average sci-fi anthology... rado 21:37, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Sun *usually* can be understood to be singular (people often say stars, not suns). Rm999

I believe that when people talk of "suns", they mean stars that are similar in characteristic to ours, rather than any old stars elsewhere in the universe (or even other universes). -- Smjg 21:32, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

Indeed. But if you consider uniqueness to be part of the dictionary definition of a universe, then this might affect how you classify the noun....

(You also get "universes" in the study of mechanical puzzles such as Rubik's Cube, but that's an aside....) -- Smjg 21:32, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

The words "suns" and "universes" exist, which is the point. A sun is a star from the perspective of its orbiting planets, more or less. The words come from a time when the sun and stars were believed to be fundamentally different things. Likewise, "universe" meant everything, at a time before people realized there might be more than everything. Sluggoster (talk) 21:56, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

The article is at the moment not deep enough to cover these topics. In fact, not oftenly discussed though, there are several kinds of number in linguistics: there is a morphological number, syntactical number as well as semantic one. And the nouns may be different kinds of "tantum" as well. So you may calculate the number of combinations. And some other syntactical and semantical attributes may affect the number, like countability or proper-nameness. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.11.138.2 (talk • contribs) 12:18, 15 December 2006

Not getting into any of that, I think Smjg is right, dust shouldn't be the example used as you can't have "a dust". How about changing it to something like sheep or fish? Or both, seeing as there are two examples of the plural, why not have two examples of the singular? 82.6.83.187 08:39, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Is there some English dialect in which you cannot have several sheep? -- Smjg 12:14, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Sheep and fish certainly aren't examples (they are nouns with common plural and sing forms) -- but perhaps we need a better example than "dust" if there is one -- the point being that perhaps all singularia tantum in the English language are mass nouns, but this may not be true of other languagues.--mervyn 13:54, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, in that case it needs to be re-written, because from reading this I thought that was what a singulare tantum was (referred to in the singular no matter the quantity), and a mass noun was something different (that has no singular, per se). The page says a singulare tantum is the converse of a plurale tantum, which by the current definition would be "a noun that appears only in the singular form and does not have a plural variant, though it may still refer to one or many of the object it names", which in my vocabulary means sheep. So what is the definitive difference between the three (plurale tantum, singulare tantum, mass noun) then? 82.6.83.187 15:00, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

To try to address some of the confusion, have added a def of sing tant from the OED and another example. Please note that "sheep" is one of class words which have the same form in the singular as the plural, and thus has no relevance to this article.--mervyn 13:32, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Dust is a mass noun, and hence is singular (which means grammatically singular) since it takes a verb with -s, as in The dust drives me crazy, and takes a singular referring pronoun, as in I hate dust -- it drives me crazy. Duoduoduo (talk) 21:58, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Are 'scissors' and 'pants' really plurale tantum?

I'm asking this more as clarification since I'm not really qualified to edit this article. I was a little confused by the english examples of plurale tantum.

I'm just curious as to whether plurale tantum refers to the whether the singlular form has never been used or just not used commonly. For example I found examples of the word scissor used in singluar form for example a company which manufactures scissors is called a scissor manufacturer, just the same as a company which manufacures boots is called a boot manufacturer. Would this usage count as a singular form of the word even though it's being used as a qualifying adjective?

I thought the same might apply to pants since we either use or imply a 'pair' of pants just like a pair of scissors

Jibbercan 21:42, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

My understanding is that "scissor" isn't a word at all there, in that it has no existence outside of the noun phrases in which it occurs. In other words, you can't talk of "a scissor" or claim that "this manufacturer is scissor" or anything like that. (There is a verb "scissor", however, but that's an aside.)

Other examples include "trouser leg", at least if the dictionary you go by doesn't give the old use of "trouser" from the days when a pair of them were two separate garments. -- Smjg 00:25, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

wikt:scissors#Noun, wikt:pants#Noun (trousers), and wikt:spectacles#Noun (eyeglasses) are each leading representatives of the three principal classes of "pairs-of" words in English. They and their near-synonyms (including, in the case of scissors, not-so-synonymous words like tongs, calipers, and pliers) represent a distinct class of nouns in English insofar as how they behave with respect to number. Although, arguably, there might be something you could call a "scissor", a "pant", a "spectacle" which you could produce by removing the rivet or screw that holds the two blade-and-handle units together, tearing the pants apart at the crotch, and snapping the spectacles at the bridge, the result is not referred to that way, but rather in reference to the sundered whole. Usage says that when precision of number is really important, you don't say "14 scissors", you say "14 pairs of scissors". On the other hand, if you order "14 scissors" and someone delivers "7 pairs of scissors", you would certainly feel cheated and judge and jury would almost certainly agree with you.

It is not hard to find usages such as "the scissors is sharp" and "the scissors are sharp" with the same intended meaning as "the pair of scissors is sharp".

In the end, I do not quite see the value of the plurale tantum concept with respect to these. It doesn't give enough specific information. DCDuring (talk) 17:52, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Jibbercan, I have added a section to the article which explains attributive forms like "scissor manufacturer". Linguists still regard words like "scissors" as plurale tantum, notwithstanding that "scissor" is an actual word as you point out, because the syntactical contexts in which "scissor" can appear are far more restricted than for the vast majority of singular nouns in the English language. Historical use is generally regarded by linguists as irrelevant when determining questions of contemporary grammar, as the linguistic model in the brain of the native speaker does not contain etymological and historical information. Likewise, "data" is plurale tantum in the English which I speak, because I don't use the word "datum" (instead saying "piece of data"), irrespective of the fact that other English speakers may use datum/data as a normal singular/plural pair. 81.31.112.212 (talk) 10:32, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Um hum! In my English idiolect, data is a collective noun. Data consists of very many facts, pieces of data, which are, or ought to be, organized into some form of a database. Despite being the plural of the participle of the Latin verb dō “give”, the English word data, as a collective noun, is construed as a singular noun, and requires singular verbs. In my idiolect, the Latin singular datum is used only in highly specific contexts, for example, the North American Datum used by mapmakers; in this sense the plural of datum is datums. For other idiolects, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data#Usage_in_English — Solo Owl (talk) 20:48, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

In accepted usage, data can be used as an uncountable noun meaning information (and hence used in the singular, as in The data is available) or as a plural countable noun meaning statistically derived numbers, as in The data are full of mistakes. Duoduoduo (talk) 21:51, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Plural form of non-count nouns

The article says "In some non-count words, the plural means 'more than one sort of'". I've added an example-needed tag to this statement. The closest I can come to an example is "The farms grow different coffees". But it's not a good example because (1) almost always people would say The farms grow different strains (types, species) of coffee, and (2) coffees can also mean units of coffee instead of types of coffee, as in Waiter, we'll have three coffees. Duoduoduo (talk) 22:05, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

Strength is an example -- I'll put it in. Duoduoduo (talk) 13:45, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

plural of plurale tantum

The article says pluralia tantum. Should it be pluralia tanta? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.194.81.94 (talk) 01:34, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

I think tantum is an adverb, not an adjective, in this construction. See tantum at Wiktionary. DCDuring (talk) 11:51, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Informations

There is a sense of information that is countable, referring to a kind of legal document. See information at Wiktionary. DCDuring (talk) 11:54, 9 April 2012 (UTC)