The fine structure of the Russian noun phrase: A comparative perspective (Follow-up application)

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Ljudmila Geist
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 445439335

The countability status of nouns is visible in their compatibility with numerals and other quantifiers. While it is nowadays undisputed that countability is not directly determined by the nominal root but is a property of noun phrases, it has been a subject of much debate how different syntactic functional heads in the noun phrase determine countability. The main goal of the project is to develop a proposal for the fine-grained structure of the noun phrase in Russian which can also account for differences in German. This comparison will contribute not only to the typology of countability but also to the theoretical debate about the universality of functional categories.In phase I the project focused on morphemes that indicate countability: the singulative morphemes in Russian in comparison to classifiers in Chinese, and the plural morphemes in Russian and German. I identified the distribution and interpretation of these morphemes and provided a formal analysis in the framework of Distributed Morphology. The examination of different interpretations of the plural led to the discovery of a new type I called aggregate plural. It can be identified on the basis of measuring constructions like A KILO OF APPLES. In contrast to aggregate mass nouns in the singular like SAND, RICE and FURNITURE, plural nouns like APPLES have been assumed to be countable and to denote pluralities consisting of discrete objects, i.e. sums, - an assumption also supported by psychological studies. However, I have shown that in the domain of foodstuffs, individuals in the denotation of plural nouns are in some contexts inaccessible for counting and other operations and hence they behave grammatically like aggregate mass nouns rather than as count nouns. This suggests that such plurals denote aggregates analogously to aggregate mass nouns in the singular. Aggregates are pluralities of objects that habitually occur in spatial proximity. They have been analyzed in the framework of Mereotopology as clusters of connected objects, which have to be distinguished from sums of separate objects. Grammatically, the units built into clusters are inaccessible for counting and other processes that require strong access to discrete objects of a plurality. Phase II focuses on aggregate plurals in Russian and German. I will test the hypothesis that plural aggregate nouns denote clustered pluralities not only in the domain of foodstuffs but also in other conceptual domains which, according to typological studies, facilitate aggregate denotations cross-linguistically. To uncover differences between clustering/aggregate plural and summing plural I will examine nouns which have two distinct plural forms. To determine the compositional structure of aggregate nouns I will analyze morphologically derived nouns like Germ. GEBIRGE. The final aim is to explain the difference in the encoding of aggregates as singular mass and as plural on the basis of the derivational history of the respective nouns.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants