The phenomenon of pluralia tantum in view of the Structuralist and the Functional Linguistics

Abstract

The lexical items of an inflectional language, such as Portuguese, belong to paradigms of noun classes, which are intersected by morphological paradigms called manifestations in this paper. Number, like gender, is a manifestation, as it is subordinate to lexical units, which, in turn, are subordinate to noun classes within the sign instance of Meaning. Abstract paradigms, constructed by the union of morphological paradigms where there are intersections, are called categories. Examples of categories in the Portuguese language are: gender, number, case, conjugation, tense-mood, number-person, deixis, and definiteness. Only within a typology of isolating languages, manifestations are confused with categories. In the expression of signs, there are manifestations that, despite existing, are considered aesthetically inadequate, undesirable, or even "incorrect” from the point of view of normativity. There are also manifestations that do not exist for morphophonological reasons. Finally, there are rare manifestations, due to semantic reasons or frequency of use. This diversity of situations reveals a theoretical problem: if there are words without a specific manifestation in binary categories such as number, generating lexical items in an inflectional language typical of isolating languages, which are considered "without inflection", it is also possible to scientifically define what constitutes an "exception" outside the normative bias, namely: a paradigm whose cardinality is significantly smaller than the other paradigms under analysis. Thus, it would be possible to imagine exceptional paradigms that are even unitary sets. The normative question, however, alerts us to something even deeper and usually disregarded by linguistic studies: the question of the existence of a linguistic item. The supposed non-existence of a manifestation, as occurs in the phenomenon of pluralia tantum presented by Grammar, actually hides a problem of frequency of use in a certain synchronicity and also the problem of the path of comprehension, understood as contrary to that of expression, from the World to the sign instances (Reference, Signified and Signifier). The semantic disparity between singular and plural of the same lexical unit, however, as can be observed in corpora, is directly linked to its frequency of use and is not a matter of anomalistic bias, as presented in the exceptions of Grammar, of analogical bias.