The present paper focuses on a particular class of substantives that occupy an intermediary position between substantives with normal number features (i.e. nouns with grammatical plural and singular) and the well-known instances of defectives, pluralia and singularia tantum (i.e. nouns with lexical plural or singular). The nouns of this intermediary class form both number forms, i.e. have full number paradigms, but share some features with the pluralia or singularia tantum. Specifically, in certain contexts, which might be called ‘non-arithmetic’ contexts, where the number opposition is semantically irrelevant (such as ‘__ rises / rise in price’ or ‘__ grows / grow slowly’), such nouns select for singular or plural only, and, accordingly, can be qualified as ‘SG-oriented’ (e.g., Russ. repa ‘turnip’; cf. (1a)) or ‘PL-oriented’ (e.g., Russ. ogurec ‘cucumber’; cf. (1b)), respectively:
(1) Russian
a. Repa medlenno rastet v gorške
turnip:nom.sg slowly grow:pres.3sg in pot
‘Turnips grow slowly in a pot.’
b. Ogurcy medlenno rastut v gorške
cucumber:nom.pl slowly grow:pres.3pl in pot
‘Cucumbers grow slowly in a pot.’
This class of substantives briefly discussed in the pioneer work Polivanova (1983), focusing on the lexical class of nouns for fruits and vegetables in Russian, has unfortunately received little attention in studies on number and in grammars of individual languages.
I argue that a syntactic description of the category of grammatical number is further complicated by the fact that the class of ‘non-arithmetic’ contexts is quite heterogeneous. There are good reasons to divide ‘non-arithmetic’ contexts into neutral vs. Plural- and Singular-oriented. Thus, such contexts as ‘__ rises / rise in price’ strongly impose the use of the plural even for several non-PL-oriented nouns, and therefore should probably be qualified as ‘PL-oriented non-arithmetic contexts’, cf. (2):
(2) Russian
a. Repa dorožaet
turnip:nom.sg rise.in.price:pres.3sg
‘Turnips rise in price.’
b. Ogurcy dorožajut
cucumber:nom.pl rise.in.price:pres.3pl
‘Cucumbers rise in price.’
c. Arbuzy/*Arbuz dorožajut
watermelon:nom.pl/*watermelon:nom.sg rise.in.price:pres.3pl
‘Watermelons rise in price.’
Such examples of the asymmetry of numbers may be of crucial importance for the general analysis of the grammatical category of number.
Polivanova, A. Vybor čislovyx form suščestvitel'nogo v russkom jazyke. Problemy strukturnoj lingvistiki – 1981. Moskva: Nauka, 1983.