There is a great deal of variation in the grammatical encoding of foodstuffs in different languages. For instance, names of berries, legumes and root vegetables which are plurals in German (Erbsen ‘peas’, Möhren ‘carrots’, Erdbeeren ‘strawberries’) are singular mass nouns in Russian (gorox, morkov’, klubnika). It has been assumed that the two types of grammatical manifestation − singular mass vs. plural − correspond to two different countability classes. Singular mass nouns are uncountable, since they do not display a singular/plural contrast. While plural nouns have been assumed to be countable (Wierzbicka 1988).
I will critically scrutinize the view that plural nouns denoting foodstuffs in German are always countable. My empirical investigation (Geist 2024) shows that they can occur in “mass” contexts and display properties of mass nouns, hence, they belong to the same grammatical class of uncountable (mass) nouns as their Russian counterparts. This plural is distinct from the ordinary countable plural.
The difference between the countable and uncountable plural will be accounted for using the fine-grained nominal structure in (1), assuming that the countable plural, as an individuated plurality, realizes the plural feature in Numo after division / individuation has taken place in Divo (Mathieu 2014). This plural denotes the set of arbitrary sums of individuated atoms (Link 1983). The uncountable plural will be analysed as unindividuated plurality. Speaking in mereo-topological terms (Grimm 2012, Wągiel 2018), it denotes the set of clusters as structured configurations of atoms. Syntactically, this uncountable “clustered” plural is an exponent of little no. It is similar to other types of idiosyncratic plurals (Acquaviva 2019, Alexiadou 2011, Dali & Mathieu 2021).
(1) [NumP [Num’ Numo [DivP [Div’ Divo [nP [n’ no [ [] ]]]]]]]
Selected references: • Acquaviva, P. 2008. Lexical plurals. • Alexiadou, A. 2011. Plural mass nouns and the morpho-syntax of number. • Dali, M. & É. Mathieu. 2021. A theory of distributed number. • Geist, L. 2024. A mass/count distinction in nouns for foodstuffs. A contrastive view. Languages in Contrast 24:2, 297-323. Grimm, S. 2012. Number and individuation. PhD thesis • Wierzbicka, A. 1988. The semantics of grammar.