Collectives in the Qur'Ān Revisited: Another Possibility of Semantic Agreement

Abstract

Abstract The present paper revisits Dror's (2016a) analysis of collective nouns and their agreement patterns in the Qur'ān. Collectives are ‘unmarked plurals’, i.e. morphologically singular nouns that semantically refer to a plurality of entities. With respect to agreement, Dror distinguishes between singular agreement (syntactic) and plural agreement (semantic), signalling respectively a holistic or distributive reference. We argue that, although the consideration of plural agreement as semantically motivated is correct, gender should also be taken into consideration, especially when a mismatch occurs between morphologically masculine singular collectives and feminine singular agreeing targets. The present paper, grounded in a typological approach, demonstrates that feminine singular agreement with masculine singular controllers represents another form of semantic agreement, in which the controller is considered as a non-individuated plural.