This study explores regular plural marking for Urdu nouns. In Urdu, plural marking is achieved with the addition of the suffix markers -e, -õ, -yā̃, and -ẽ. In this study, the regular plural marking of regular nouns and the regular plural markers are assumed to be grammatical number-agreement triggers at the sentence level. The patterns of regular nouns in the three relevant factors of the language are complex (gender, phonological structure, and case). Fifteen regular nouns were chosen as examples to test root maintenance, suffixing, vowel variation, and gender alternations. Data were collected from dictionaries and published texts. The results indicate that plural formation in Urdu is systematic and predictable, governed by established morphological patterns. However, the phonological environment may introduce variation: masculine nouns ending in -a form their direct plural with -e and oblique plural with -õ, feminine nouns ending in -i take -yā̃, and those ending in a consonant take -ẽ. These plural markers encode number features that extend beyond the word level, triggering feature agreement on verbs and adjectives at the sentence level.

This study investigates the use of English inflectional morphemes in the spoken dialogues of the two main characters, Louisa Clark and William Traynor, in the film Me Before You. The objectives are to identify the types and functions of inflectional morphemes used, as well as to determine the most dominant form found in the characters’ utterances. Inflectional morphemes, which do not change the basic meaning or word class, provide grammatical information such as tense, number, aspect, possession, and degree of comparison. A qualitative descriptive method was employed, using the film and its transcripts as the primary sources. Data were analyzed using both formal and informal methods. The formal method was used to calculate the frequency of each morpheme, while the informal method was applied to interpret the function of each morpheme in context, based on the theoretical framework by Fromkin et al. The results reveal all eight types of English inflectional morphemes occurred in the data, with the most dominant being the plural marker morpheme -s, which appeared 54 times. The analysis demonstrates that inflectional morphemes are not only essential in shaping grammatical accuracy but also contribute meaningfully to character development and narrative clarity. This research highlights how minor grammatical elements can play a significant role in conveying meaning in naturalistic dialogues. It is expected that this study will offer valuable insight into the application of morphological theory in media discourse and support further research in both linguistics and film studies.

Abstract This article investigates the development of declension classes in parts of West Central German with historical and regional data. The focus lies on the plural marking of nouns belonging to the neuter a -declension and the feminine ō -declension. The analysis explores the formation of distinct plural markers from the 11 th to the 19 th century. The diachronic and diatopic distribution patterns are elucidated and related to semantic factors such as animacy. The study confirms that number strengthening ( Numerusprofilierung ) is a central motive for diachronic change in noun inflection and highlights the influence of phonological processes on the organization of declension classes.

Grounded in the principle of Antihomophony (Kayne 2019a), several grammatical/functional morphemes, previously considered to have different properties according to their distribution, are examined. A more abstract and fine-grained analysis of the contexts in which these morphemes appear confirms that they are the same element in all constructions. After reviewing elements such as there, will, Italian feminine marker -a or Spanish plural marker -s, the so-called partitive preposition of is argued to be the same element as the one in other constructions. Therefore, Antihomophony is a powerful principle that simplifies the functional lexicon.

ABSTRACT Language development in bilingual children presents a complex and fascinating area of study, especially regarding syntactic acquisition in understudied language pairings like English and Indonesian. This case study explores the syntactic development of Kaka, a six-year-old sequential bilingual child (English L1, Indonesian L2) living in an Indonesian-speaking environment. Data were collected using naturalistic observation and structured interviews, then analysed using Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) and qualitative structural analysis. Addressing the research questions regarding syntactic manifestation and dominance, the results show that Kaka's English MLU (9.29) exceeds the monolingual age norm, while her Indonesian MLU (6.17) remains lower. Dominant syntactic structures were found in English, with evident cross-linguistic influence (CLI) from English to Indonesian, manifested as unnatural grammatical constructions (e.g. redundant plural markers). By applying Brown’s Order of Acquisition and the Usage-Based Theory framework, this study refines existing theories by demonstrating that in sequential bilingualism, strong L1 dominance established through consistent home input can dictate the direction of syntactic transfer (L1 to L2) and override the influence of the societal language environment. Finally, the study proposes a preliminary conceptual framework for early sequential bilingual syntactic development, offering a new theoretical lens for understanding syntactic transfer in typologically distinct language pairs.

This study investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of three Korean plural markers: -<italic>huy</italic>, -<italic>ney</italic>, and -<italic>tul</italic>. We argue that each marker syntactically forms its own N-adjunction structure with the preceding N, where N is the head and the marker is a non-head modifier, as described by Wiltschko (2008). Each marker also contributes a distinct semantic function that shifts the extension of the preceding N. We further claim that a numeral classifier has this function only in the so-called classifier-case type numeral classifier construction in Korean, which Choi (2025a) likewise analyzes as an N-adjunction structure. If correct, these claims undermine the major arguments of Park (2022) regarding plural -<italic>tul</italic> and its co-occurrence relationship with numeral classifiers. We reject Park’s appositive-type structural analysis of numeral classifiers and argue that -<italic>tul</italic> can co-occur with a classifier because it functions as a modifier rather than a head.

This paper examines the pronunciation of the plural marker &lt;-s&gt; pronounced by the Yakthung/Limbu-speaking English learners. Drawing on a qualitative research design (Taylor, 2016), the study is based on data collected from twenty Grade 8 students at Phidim Secondary School, where English- and Nepali-medium classes are conducted in parallel. In addition, three English teachers participated in the study. As noted by Dirsa and Andika (2022), teachers’ practices significantly shape learning outcomes, as they serve as facilitators, mentors, and evaluators in the classroom. The findings indicate that linguistic diversity and instances of overgeneralization (Baihaqi, 2020) pose challenges for learners’ pronunciation of plural forms; however, these difficulties can be addressed through creative and targeted instructional strategies. The study highlights the need for both teachers and learners to be aware of pronunciation issues during the teaching–learning process.

This article examines whether the second language (L2) acquisition of English plural marking by learners from Generalized Classifier first languages (L1s) is affected by L1 transfer. Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and Korean exhibit micro-variation with regard to contexts in which plural markers are required, optional, or disallowed. This article lays out the predictions for L1 transfer from these three languages to English, based on the micro-variation, and under different theoretical approaches to transfer (the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis of Lardiere and the Morphological Congruency Hypothesis of Jiang et al.). The article then reviews seven studies that use online processing tasks in order to gauge whether L1 Mandarin / L1 Japanese / L1 Korean L2 English learners are sensitive to the omission of plural marking in English. The findings of these studies are discussed in light of the predictions based on micro-variation; the article lays out directions for possible future studies that would directly address L1 transfer in this domain.

This study discusses morphophonological number marking in Luo, a western Nilotic language spoken in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, South Sudan, and Ethiopia. Luo, being an agglutinative language, most of its nouns can be easily fragmented into several morphemes, although there are some nouns that are morphologically unmarked for singular or plural. Nilotic languages have shown the connection between morphological morphemes and phonological aspects like tone, vowel length, sound alternation, and change in ATR vowel quality in creating inflection values. This study specifically discusses the impact of both morphological markers and phonological markers of number inflection in Luo. Data collection involved seven Luo native speakers from the Rorya district of Tanzania, where the language is predominantly spoken within the country. The study employed a descriptive research design guided by Distributed Morphology theory. The study also used an elicitation method for data collection. Findings describe suffixation as a dominant number marking process, with processes such as change in syllable coda, internal sound changes, voicing, and devoicing having an inescapable role in unveiling number inflection in both nouns and adjectives. Both suffixation and the aforementioned phonological processes display irregularity when attached to different stems and nouns. The study also discusses the tripartite number marking system in Luo, which is common across Nilotic languages. The system has singulative markers where plural is unmarked, plurative markers where singular is unmarked, and nouns that have both singular markers and plural markers.

This study examines the morphological development of a 58-month-old Bhutanese child, Dorji, learning English as a second language in a multilingual setting. The study employed a qualitative case study design focusing on speech samples collected during spontaneous father–child interactions. Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) and grammatical morpheme analysis were applied to assess linguistic complexity, emphasizing on plural markers, verb inflections, negations, and interrogatives. The findings indicated an MLU of 5.94, which is within the typical range range of first language learners, suggesting advanced morphological competence despite English being the child’s second language. The child demonstrated strong Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP), which is evident from the use of academic vocabulary such as “gravity” and “helium planet.” However, weaker Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills (BICS) were observed through limited conversational fluency and inadequate use of negation and question structures.The study indicated the critical role of parents in teaching early morphological development, while limited exposure to spontaneous peer interaction may hinder functional grammar growth. Overgeneralization of morphological rules, inconsistent auxiliary usage, and reliance on rising intonation for questions reflected an early developmental stage in conversational competence. Thus, the study highlighted the importance of balanced language exposure that integrates both structured academic discourse and naturalistic communication. It contributes to the limited body of research on second language acquisition in underrepresented multilingual contexts and offers pedagogical implications for early language instruction, parental involvement, and curriculum design for both academic and communicative language proficiency.

This paper deals with the expression of plurality in Thai, a classifier language part of the controversial Tai-Kadai family. Although it does not present a specific morphological mark of number, as it is usually the case in classifier languages, Thai has four main morpho-syntactic strategies to express plurality. Apart from the bare nouns, which could function as singular or plural, Thai speakers may use reduplication, albeit only on a limited number of lexical entities, the insertion of the morpheme phûak ‘group’, and the creation of a complex noun structure with either a general quantifier or a numeral. These different strategies will be presented by stressing their correlation with the syntactic structure of the noun phrase and the relation between the number/quantifier and the classifier, by arguing that these strategies correspond to different types of plural markers.

Abstract This paper discusses the taxonomy of proper names and analyses the grammatical features of proper names in Khorchin Mongolian. We argue that (i) although proper names in Khorchin Mongolian are inherent definite, but they can be coerced with an indefinite reading when combining with the indefinite article nək in existential sentences. In addition, proper names can also combine with demonstratives to derive complex expressions like “Dem+Proper name”, which express the speaker’s subjective attitude, such as derogation or contempt; (ii) when attached to proper names, the additive plural marker -ut can convey associative plural meaning, and when added to proper names, the additive plural marker -tʃut can also convey a collective meaning, referring to a specific ethnic group or tribe.

In this paper we analyze the inflectional adaptation of number of several adjectival loanwords in Catalan and Spanish. Based on a corpus of print and digital press, we quantify the forms with a plural marker (-s) and those which remain invaria­ble. According to the Natural Morphology principles of uniformity, transparency, iconicity and system-congruity, the adjectival loanwords should adopt a plural marker. However, both in Catalan and Spanish, the respective language academies suggest the invariability of number in these cases. Indeed, the analyzed forms do not usually pre­sent a plural marker, especially in occurrences with a consonantal ending. The results, therefore, agree with the academy recommendations and contravene the naturalness principles, given the lack of iconicity or syncretism that singular and plural forms usual­ly display.

Aims and Objectives: This study examines how second language (L2) learners acquire and process count and mass nouns in English, with a particular emphasis on the influence of their first language (L1). Given the crosslinguistic similarities in plural-marking systems between English and Russian, as well as the differences between English and Korean, the study aims to compare Korean- and Russian-L1 learners, investigating their ability to detect plural-marking errors in English sentence comprehension. Design/Methodology/Approach: The study employs both offline acceptability judgment and online self-paced reading tasks to assess learners’ explicit and implicit knowledge, respectively. Participants consist of three groups: Korean-L1 learners (Korean group), Russian-L1 learners (Russian group), and native English speakers (English group). This comparative design enables a systematic analysis of L1 influence on L2 acquisition. Data and Analysis: Data from the acceptability judgment task were analyzed using a cumulative link mixed-effects model. For the self-paced reading task, a linear mixed-effects regression model was applied. Findings/Conclusions: The results indicate that the Russian group performed similarly to the English group in the acceptability judgment task, while the Korean group exhibited sensitivity to grammatical errors only for count nouns. In the self-paced reading task, both learner groups struggled with real-time processing, suggesting incomplete implicit knowledge. Originality: This paper uniquely integrates offline and online tasks to test the effects of L1 knowledge on L2 acquisition and processing of plural marking, as well as contributing to the understanding of explicit and implicit knowledge in L2 learners. Significance/Implications: The findings support theories emphasizing crosslinguistic differences as major obstacles in L2 morphosyntactic acquisition. The study also demonstrates the influential roles of task type and linguistic interfaces, suggesting that cognitive load from online processing and the management of multiple information sources can impede the application of L1 and explicit knowledge during real-time processing.

Abstract This paper is a comparative study of contact effects in nominal number systems, based on a sample of 49 pairs of languages in contact and focusing on pattern borrowing. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, we find that plural marking and number marking on nouns are the features most likely to display similar encodings across languages in contact. We also show that, though less frequent globally, duals are particularly sensitive to contact effects. The study confirms that inherent inflections are more likely to show contact effects than contextual inflections. It also shows that certain number distinctions are prone to contact-induced convergence regardless of their crosslinguistic frequency.

Abstract This paper elucidates the role of internal and external factors in the semantic evolution of Basque zu from ‘you.pl’ to exclusively ‘you.sg’ and in the development of Basque zuek ‘you.pl’. Transparently, zuek involves suffixation of the demonstrative hek ‘those’ to zu. The neighboring Romance languages exhibit a parallel evolution that involves the adjectival collocation vōs alteros ‘you others’, but other similar constructions are recorded. This paper defends the premise that Basque zuek emerged through a pattern replication process in which the pivotal feature was the morphological expression of number. We argue that the grammaticalization of zuek as ‘you.pl’ started in eastern areas due to contact with Occitan, a language in which grammaticalized ‘you.pl’ forms appear earlier than in Castilian Spanish. We also address an innovation exclusive to Basque: a series of second plural verbal forms which exhibit a geographically spread pattern within the Basque Country similar to that of the Romance innovative pronouns in the Iberian Peninsula.

Well-studied attraction errors in speakers' production of subject-verb agreement arise from featural similarity between the attractor and the target (e. g., the verb) in the context of a specific syntactic relationship characterized by structural distance. This study examines production errors in a related but distinct type of featural manipulation: feature assignment in numeral phrases with modifiers such as “five rusty old windows,” in Bulgarian. The grammar of this language requires plural markers on the modifiers and a morphological count form on the final noun which speakers often erroneously replace with a regular plural form. In a series of four sentence completion experiments we demonstrate that speakers' errors in count form assignment are subject to linear rather than structural distance. Based on this, we argue that these errors are not due to attraction but instead reflect the cost of temporary storage and integration to resolve the assignment dependency, thus supporting linear distance-based theories of processing locality. Our findings also point to potential differences in the processing dynamics between agreement and feature assignment.

Japanese noun phrases are not morphologically inflected for singular/plural contrast. However, the language employs several optional plural markers. This paper argues that while Japanese lacks morphological singular/plural distinctions, the distinction is reflected semantically, as plural markers can only attach to count nouns. Additionally, the most productive plural marker, -tati, is found to be exclusively associative. This finding supports the nominal mapping hypothesis proposed by Chierchia (1998a, 1998b, 2010), indicating that Japanese does not serve as a counterexample to the framework.

Numbers express the primary concept of cardinality, the measure of the number of elements in a set that answers the question how many? Linguistically, they are conveyed through simple (dos ‘two’) or complex (doscientos ‘two hundred’). Although numerals higher than 1 are inherently plural, plurality only overtly appears on cien ‘hundred’ and millón ‘million’ and only when the numeral is part of a multiplicative number (doscientas sillas ‘two hundred.f.pl chairs’ vs. additive ciento dos sillas ‘one and hundred two chairs’). The additive vs. multiplicative constraint on overt number is analyzed as follows: complex numerals have a functional head that encodes plurality. This head is potentially realized as an affix that attaches to the root. Since additive numerals involve coordination, the coordinate structure constraint blocks -s from attaching to the root. Multiplicative numerals, on the other hand, allow for -s to attach to the root, since no additional structure blocks attachment. Plurality only appears overtly on cien ‘hundred’ and millón ‘million’ because the morphological insertion rules for plurality in cardinals treats the null plural as default and the -s plural as marked (and restricted to a few roots). Approximative numerals (miles de personas ‘thousands of people’) obligatorily show plural marking and de, instantiating yet another source of number, a functional DIV(ision) head.

Abstract This paper examines the plural marker =ɲê in Cogtse Situ, a Gyalrongic language spoken in Western Sichuan, based on data from Lin (2016). Although the etymology of =ɲê suggests that it was originally a plural marker, its morphosyntax reveals that its hosts range beyond traditional nominals and further cover infinitives, clauses, and adverbs, indicating that =ɲê has a wider array of uses beyond simply expressing plurality in modern Cogtse. In this paper, I discuss the uses and the semantics of the marker =ɲê extend to honorific, associative, approximative, and intensificative. After describing the different functions of =ɲê, I propose an evolutionary pathway for these uses. The proposal of the pathway provides a possible explanation for the relationship between different uses of this =ɲê, and this paper fills the research gap in the study of the plural marker in Gyalrongic languages.