Plurale tantum

The two and onlys

Photo by Maude Frédérique Lavoie on Unsplash

If you can own a pair of trousers, how come you can’t own a single trouser? If your home is overrun by vermin, what do you call it when you catch just one? If your field is populated by friendly cattle, why can’t you go out and give just one cattle a big hug?

A word that occurs only in the plural form, like trousers, vermin or cattle, is called plurale tantum. Latin for plural only, the term - fittingly - also has a plural version, pluralia tantum.

Often, but not always, pluralia tantum denote things that function as pairs or sets. Hence trousers as well as spectacles, underpants and outer clothes, most of which I trust you don before leaving home, lest, God forbid, your genitals should show.

Other pluralia tantum are there because we just don’t ever think of them as singular. Examples include alms as well arms (in the military sense), thanks, riches, goods, premises, odds, and loggerheads.

Curiously, though, we talk about such things as a scissor kick (not a scissors kick) and trouser press rather than trousers press. But it’s a clothes peg, not a clothe peg.

Why this inconsistency? One answer is that English has always played fast and loose with logic, something I am always happy to point out to those who argue you can’t have degrees of uniqueness or that I can’t get no satisfaction actually means it’s impossible for me to never be satisfied. Yes you can and no it doesn’t, and if you don’t agree, just listen to how people use language.

As if to emphasise the arbitrariness of language, while other languages also have pluralia tantum, theirs don’t always match ours. For example, the Swedes call a pair of scissor en sax (one scissor) and the Germans treat jeans as a singular noun.

While pluralia tantum may seem like a mere curiosity, linguists take them very seriously indeed. One way we can be certain of this is the disagreement within the field over their definition. Peter Matthews called them “nouns, like oats or trousers, which appear only in a plural form”, whereas Robert Trask preferred the narrower “noun which is plural in form but singular in meaning, such as scissors, pants or binoculars”. Trask may have painted himself into a wee corner by being so specific, as another linguist, Greville Corbett, noted when he said “scissors is not necessarily singular in meaning”. To illustrate, Corbett offered the two sentences “these scissors are blunt” and “all these scissors are blunt”, where the second clearly refers to a number of pairs of scissors.

The Lexicon of Linguistics, published by the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics, offers yet a third option: “a traditional term used for words which (a) end in a plural affix, (b) have a plural meaning, and (c) do not have a singular counterpart.” Note the slightly weasily phrase “used for”, with its subtle suggestion that the writers of said lexicon may or may not agree with said usage.

Even that definition is open to challenge, not least of all by certain writers who often refer to a single trouser. Called fashion mavens, they are the equivalent of restaurateurs who serve pommes puree because their ears have yet to be sullied by the more common mashed potatoes. It’s harmless, of course, until the bill arrives. A trouser will inevitably cost you way more than a pair of trousers (and have fewer pockets for your stuff) and you can bet that paltry serving of pommes puree won’t come cheap either.

If there are nouns that occur only in the plural form, are there also nouns that occur only in the singular? Of course! They’re called singulare tantum and they’re a million times more common than their plurale counterparts. Think wealth, misery, succotash, boorishness, milk and countless others.

If you’re paying close attention - which I assume you are - you may have paused when I included milk on that list. What about the different types of milk - dairy, almond, oat, etc? Well done for spotting that! Allow me to explain.

Most plurale singulare - like milk - are mass nouns, also known as uncountable nouns, non-count nouns, uncount nouns, or just uncountable. Any quantity of a mass noun is treated as what Wikipedia calls “an undifferentiated unit”. You may put more milk in your tea than I do, but that doesn’t mean you use more milks.

But many mass nouns can easily swap teams. When your friend peers in your fridge and, seeing an array of different plant-based milk labels, cries out “how many milks have you got in here?”, they’re not asking you about the volume of milk you have, but the types. They, linguist genius that they are, are using milk as a count noun.

Is this a) milk or b) milks? Or c) (the correct answer) bring me real milk from a cow, please?

Then there are mass nouns that can, in principle, be counted but are still treated as uncountable, like the popcorn you hoovered down at the movies last night or the grass seed you’ll be spreading on your lawn next weekend.

If you like rabbit holes, you’ll be chuffed to know that disagreements about the finer points of plurale tantum hinge on matters of semantics (to do with meaning), syntax (how words combine to form sentences) and morphology (the structure of words). Most of the time, these three elements of language play together nicely - in fact, that’s more or less what they should do for language to work. (In his 2018 paper cited earlier, Corbett gives this example: “Books denotes more than one entity, it is syntactically plural in that it takes plural agreement, and it is morphologically plural having the plural marker -s.”) But in plurale tantum, playing nice goes out the window. A word may look plural (trousers) but behave mostly in a singular manner, or look plural but be incapable of being counted (goods, premises).

I can’t wrap up today’s Lingwistics without noting a minor fact that binds Matthews and Trask: both were critical of Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar, which says there are limits on what the grammar of any language can be. All possibilities are somehow innate in children, and as they learn their native tongue, the theory postulates, they choose the possibilities allowed by that language and eliminate those that are not. Matthews and Trask were hardly alone in their position, but it’s a reminder that the ideas of giants such as Chomsky, who are often put on a pedestal by us mere mortals, are usually subject to much more rigorous scrutiny by their peers.

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Bits and specious

A nod to reader Tony Brenton-Rule who prompted this week’s subject by asking me what word one might use for a single vermin.

Choosing a Word (or Words) of the Year is a popular pastime among language writers. Here’s a nice summary of what the major dictionaries chose. Nancy Friedman, a writer I admire, cast her net wider (and also made it more fun). My favourite: HENRY, an acronym for High Earner, Not Rich Yet. Which makes me a LENRY.

Why is Chomsky so widely admired - loved even? An admirer explains.

A common theory for how children acquire language is that they rely on “mutual exclusivity”, or treating each new word as relating to a new object or category. A problem with that theory is that some words can describe many things (like bat), while some things can be described using many different words (cat, puss, pussycat, furbaby, animal). Enter the theory of focus signals, or “learning language from language”.

What not to say when introduced to identical twins.

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Quote of the week

I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman