Abstract
This paper investigates lexical mass-to-count and count-to-mass operators in Slavic languages, primarily Russian and Ukrainian, by exploring the distribution and semantic contribution of the suffix -in/-yn. The focus is on two uses of the suffix: the singulative turns mass nouns like gorox ‘pea’ into count, denoting sets of natural units (e.g., gorošina ‘a pea’), and the massifier applies to count nouns, such as kon’ ‘horse’, and turns them into mass (e.g., konina ‘horsemeat’). It is proposed that each use of -in/-yn contributes a partition operator which triggers a new division into units of the original material part. It is further argued that the singulative and the massifier should be unified, given their (i) phonological identity, (ii) shared grammatical properties, and (iii) common semantic core. Under the proposed analysis, there is a single suffix that functions as an underspecified lexical partition shifter.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Slavic languages have a range of additional (uses of the) suffixes -in/-yn, such as the possessive -in in mam-in (mother-in ‘mother’s’) or the human -in in armjan-in ‘Armenian’. It remains to be determined whether and to what extent such uses are related to the two addressed in the present paper. See Geist and Kagan (2023) for a proposal that relates the human -in to the singulative -in discussed in the present paper, but also for the differences between the two. Some of these differences are also mentioned in the Appendix.
-a is an inflectional suffix that follows -in/-yn and marks the noun as singular, nominative, and belonging to a particular declension class (for instance, in Russian, this is inflectional class II, using Timberlake’s 2004 notation). All nouns containing the -in/-yn suffix under the two uses addressed in this paper belong to this class and thus, in the nominative singular form, end in -ina/-yna. If a noun without -in/-yn belongs to the same class, the inflectional suffix -a does not form part of the stem to which -in/-yn is attached (e.g., in the case of ovca ‘’sheep’, -in attaches to the stem ovc-).
As pointed out by an anonymous reviewer, the asymmetry may result from the fact that, as indicated by Bach (1986), the result of a count-to-mass shift is much more predictable than that of the mass-to-count shift. In the former case, we systematically get P-matter, but in the latter, the mass may be divided into units in different ways. It is possible that the existence of the overt massifier-in/-yn is motivated by the fact that the resulting meanings are in part idiosyncratic and not fully predictable (see discussion in Sects. 4.1 and 4.3.2.).
Etimologičeskij onlajn-slovar′ russkogo jazyka Maksa Fasmera [Maks Fasmer’s Etymological Online Dictionary of the Russian Language], https://lexicography.online/etymology/vasmer/, accessed 23/03/2023.
From a synchronic perspective, odin ‘one’ is probably not divisible into meaningful units but should rather be analyzed as a single morpheme. Inoj ‘different’, is, in contrast, clearly divided into the root in and the inflectional adjectival suffix -oj (adjectival nominative masculine singular).
For a detailed discussion of why the Russian -in should be analyzed as a singulative, rather than diminutive, see Kagan and Nurmio (2023). For example, -in does not contribute the entailment of smallness: l’dina ‘ice-floe’, posudina ‘a dish’, and xvorostina ‘a long stick’ can be quite big. The same holds for the Ukrainian posudyna ‘a dish’ or tzybulyna ‘an onion’.
Ukrainian examples in (10)-(12) are taken mainly from Wągiel and Shlikhutka (2022).
We may ask ourselves what happens when we observe a small piece of a pea in a salad. This piece instantiates the property gorox but not gorošina. Then what about the matter that makes it up? It clearly is part of ϻxGOROX(x). But is it also part of ϻxGOROŠINA(x)? I believe that the answer is positive. Even if the piece is currently not part of any individuated pea, it used to be one in the past. While I do not explicitly introduce times and possible worlds as part of the proposed analysis for the sake of simplicity, I assume that the concept of a property P is not restricted to instantiations of P in the actual world at the time of speech. Any piece of a pea and even particle of pea-powder used to be part of a natural pea-unit. Such a piece would still not instantiate the property gorošina (since it is not a whole). But the matter that constitutes it is part of the matter that made up a certain GOROŠINA-individual.
It can be observed that -in/-yn sometimes attaches directly to the root and sometimes follows the suffix -at. Arguably, the latter is an allomorph of -onok, a diminutive suffix that contributes the meaning component ‘child of’, e.g., žerebjonok ‘foal’ – žerebjata ‘foals’ (the allomorph analysis is proposed by Gouskova and Bobaljik 2021). Indeed, Shvedova et al. note that -in may apply to plural stems denoting baby animals. It is not entirely certain whether the -at that -in/-yn applies on top of is indeed the same diminutive suffix that we observe in žerebjonok-type nouns, but this is not critical for the purposes of the present paper.
It is worth noting that the term mass term correspondent, whose relevance is suggested in (22)-(23) above, is indeed defined by Link (1983, p. 132) via the notion of supremum.
https://tinyurl.com/32d6mvd2, accessed 13.06.2022.
https://m.e1.ru/f/74/128576/p/1, accessed 13.06.2022.
Chierchia (2021) further indicates that if grinding applies to a count property P and then packaging applies to the result, we will get the equivalent of the original property: Σ(G(PC)) = PC (from Chierchia 2021, ex. (6c)) – assuming that G(\(P_{C} \)) creates a mass property correspondent of \(P_{C}\), and Σ(\(P_{M} \)) creates a count property correspondent of \(P_{M}\). Note that this equivalence can only hold as long as we consider it possible to ignore irrelevant parts, like chicken blood or horse hairs.
Analogous restrictedness is observed with other derivational affixes, which favor meanings that are natural out of context. For instance, Kagan and Alexeyenko (2011) illustrate such restrictions on the application of the productive Russian adjectival suffix -ovat, e.g., the existence of the form ploxovatyj ‘somewhat too bad’ versus the non-existence of *xoroševatyj ‘somewhat too good’.
Two alternative approaches to the relation between the singulative and the massifier -in/-yn could potentially be considered: polysemy and morphological reversal. The polysemy approach would mean that they are the same suffix (as is indeed argued in this section) with multiple related meanings. What I find troubling about this approach is the fact that the contribution of the singulative and the massifier seems to be not just related, but reversed. Typically, polysemous items contribute readings that share a certain meaning component, rather than being antonymous. Ultimately, I propose an analysis that explains in what way the two -in/-yn’s can be unified, but that analysis does not require viewing them as either homonymous or polysemous; rather, it proposes a uniform, albeit underspecified, meaning. The second possibility is that this is an instance of morphological reversal. This phenomenon, whereby the same form sometimes marks opposing values of a given feature, has been reported in the literature for a range of languages (e.g., Meinhof 1912; Hetzron 1967; Baerman 2007). In our case, the relevant opposition would be mass ∼ count. (In fact, Doron and Müller 2014 even discuss morphological reversal specifically in the context of the collective/singulative opposition in Semitic.) This is a possible approach, but the question is whether the opposition under discussion is reducible to two values of a morphological feature. After all, this is a complex semantic phenomenon, with a number of semantic, lexical and even cultural factors at work. It is therefore desirable to pinpoint the semantic basis for unification.
In case one prefers a weaker version of the material fusion generalization (inclusion rather than identity, as discussed in Sect. 4.3.1 above), (31) can be substituted by (i):
-
(i)
-
(i)
But see Musatov (2015) for additional examples, although many of them are archaic or belong to nonstandard spoken dialects, e.g., sani – sanina ‘sleigh – sleigh runner’, štiblety – štibletina ‘boots – boot’.
I wish to thank Ayoub Noamane (p.c.) for the discussion of Moroccan Arabic examples.
In fact, not every birch tree grows in a birch grove, and thus a collective noun would not cover all birch-matter. This is similar to what was observed in Sect. 4.3.1 for massifier -in/-yn: not every part of a horse instantiates horsemeat. By analogy with what has been proposed in Sect. 4.3.1, we could either say that separately-growing birches are treated as irrelevant or that the material fusion of the P’s and the material fusion of the P-yn’s need not always be identical; rather, the material fusion of the P-yn’s must be included, whether properly or not, in the material fusion of the P’s.
I wish to thank Yael Greenberg (p.c.) for bringing the “kind bias” of these stems to my attention.
The latter point is also raised with respect to singulative -in by Kagan and Nurmio (2023).
I am grateful to David Erschler (p.c.) for pointing to me this example and its implications.
References
Acquaviva, Paolo. 2008. Lexical plurals: A morpho-semantic approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acquaviva, Paolo. 2015. Singulatives. In Word-Formation. An international handbook for the languages of Europe, eds. O. Müller, I. Ohnheiser, S. Olsen, and F. Rainer. Vol. 2, 1171–1182. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Acquaviva, Paolo. 2018. Categorization as noun construction: Gender, number, and entity types. In Gender and noun classification, eds. É. Mathieu, M. Dali, and G. Zareikar, 41–63. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198828105.003.0003.
Bach, Emmon. 1986. The algebra of events. Linguistics and Philosophy 9: 5–16. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00627432.
Baerman, Matthew. 2007. Morphological reversals. Journal of Linguistics 43: 33–61. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4177027.
Bagasheva-Koleva, M. 2016. The category of augmentation in Bulgarian and Russian and its rendering into English. In СВЕТЪТ Е СЛОВО, СЛОВОТО Е СВЯТ, 102–108. Blagoevgrad: Jugozapa den Universitet “Neofit Pilsky”.
Bale, Alan C., and David Barner. 2009. The interpretation of functional heads: Using comparatives to explore the mass/count distinction. Journal of Semantics 26(3): 217–252. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffp003.
Bilodid, I. K. 1970-1980. Slovnik ukrayinsloy movy [the dictionary of Ukrainian language]. Kiev: Naukova dumka.
Borer, Hagit. 2005. Name only. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bunt, H. 1979. Ensembles and the formal semantic properties of mass terms. In Mass terms: Some philosophical problems, ed. F. J. Pelletier, 249–277. Dordrecht: Kluwer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4110-5_18.
Cheng, Lisa Lai-Shen, Jenny Doetjes, and Rint Sybesma. 2008. How universal is the universal grinder? Linguistics in the Netherlands 25(1): 50–62. https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.25.08che.
Chierchia, Gennaro. 2010. Mass nouns, vagueness and semantic variation. Synthese 174(1): 99–149.
Chierchia, Gennaro. 2021. Mass vs. count: Where do we stand? Outline of a theory of semantic variation. In Things and stuff: The semantics of the count-mass distinction, eds. T. Kiss, F. J. Pelletier, and H. Husić, 21–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108937979.003.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 2015. Augmentative, pejorative, diminutive and endearing heads in the extended nominal projection. In Structures, strategies and beyond, eds. E. Di Domenico, C. Hamann, and S. Matteini, 67–81. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Corbett, Greville. 2000. Number. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dali, Myriam, and Éric Mathieu. 2021. Singulative systems. In The Oxford handbook of grammatical number, eds. P. Cabredo Hofherr and J. Doetjes, 275–290. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
De Belder, Marijke. 2011. A morphosyntactic decomposition of countability in Germanic. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 14: 173–202. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-011-9045-0.
De Belder, Marijke, Noam Faust, and Nicola Lampitelli. 2014. On a low and high diminutive: Evidence from Italian and Hebrew. In The syntax of roots and the roots of syntax, eds. A. Alexiadou, H. Borer, and F. Schäfer, 149–163. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dimmendaal, G. J. 2000. Number marking and noun categorization in Nilo-Saharan languages. Anthropological Linguistics 42(2): 214–261. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30028548.
Doron, Edit, and Ana Müller. 2014. The cognitive basis of the mass-count distinction: Evidence from bare nouns. In Crosslinguistic studies on noun phrase structure and reference, eds. P. Cabredo Hofherr and A. Zribi-Hertz, 73–101. Leiden: Brill.
Fassi Fehri, Abdelkader. 2018. Constructing feminine to mean: Gender, number, numeral, and quantifier extensions in Arabic. Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield.
Geist, Ljudmila, and Olga Kagan. 2023. Deriving members of social groups with in. In SinFonija 2023, Brno.
Geist, Ljudmila, Olga Kagan, and David Erschler. 2023, in press. Singulativity, the mass-count distinction, and the Russian suffix -in. Journal of Slavic Linguistics.
Gouskova, M., and J. D. Bobaljik. 2021. Russian baby diminutives: Heading toward an analysis. Unpublished manuscript.
Grimm, Scott. 2012. Number and individuation, PhD dissertation, Stanford University.
Grimm, Scott. 2013. Plurality is distinct from number neutrality. In Proceedings of the 41 meeting of the North East linguistic society, eds. Y. Fainleib, N. LaCara, and Y. Park, 247–258. Amherst MA: GLSA.
Grimm, Scott. 2018. Grammatical number and the scale of individuation. Language 94(3): 527–574.
Grimm, Scott, and Mojmír Dočekal. 2021. Counting aggregates, groups and kinds: Countability from the perspective of a morphologically complex language. In Countability in natural language, ed. H. Filip, 85–120. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316823774.005.
Hetzron, Robert. 1967. Agaw numerals and incongruence in Semitic. Journal of Semitic Studies 12: 169–193. https://doi.org/10.1093/jss/12.2.169.
Jurafsky, Daniel. 1996. Universal tendencies in the semantics of the diminutive. Language 72(3): 533–578.
Kagan, Olga, and Silvia Nurmio. 2023, in press. Diminutive or singulative? The suffixes -in and -k in Russian. In Diminutives across languages, theoretical frameworks and linguistic domains, eds. S. Manova, L. Grestenberger, and K. Korecky-Kröll. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Kagan, Olga, and Sascha Alexeyenko. 2011. The adjectival suffix -ovat as a degree modifier in Russian. In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 15, eds. I. Reich et al.. 321–335. Saarbrücken: Universaar.
Kramer, Ruth. 2015. The morphosyntax of gender. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Krifka, Manfred. 1989. Nominal reference, temporal constitution and quantification in event semantics. In Semantics and contextual expression, eds. Renate Bartsch, Johan van Benthem, and Peter van Emde Boas, 75–115. Dordrecht: Foris Publications Holland.
Landman, Fred. 2016. Iceberg semantics for count nouns and mass nouns: The evidence from portions. The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition Logic and Communication 11: 1–48.
Landman, Fred. 2020. Iceberg semantics for mass nouns and count nouns. New York: Springer.
Levy-Forsythe, Zarina, and Olga Kagan. 2023. Classifiers and the mass-count distinction in Uzbek. Ms., Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
Link, Godehard. 1983. The logical analysis of plurals and mass terms: A lattice-theoretical approach. In Formal semantics: The essential readings, eds. P. H. Portner and B. H. Partee, 127–147. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Link, Godehard. 1987. Generalized quantifiers and plurals. In Generalized quantifiers: Linguistic and logical approaches, ed. P. Gärdenfors, 151–180. Dordrecht: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3381-1_6.
Manova, Stela. 2015. Affix ordering across languages and frameworks. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marantz, Alec. 2001. Words and things. Unpublished manuscript, MIT and NYU.
Mathieu, Éric. 2012. Flavors of division. Linguistic Inquiry 43: 650–679. https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00110.
Mathieu, Éric. 2014. Many a plural. In Weak referentiality, eds. A. Aguilar-Guevara, B. Le Bruyn and J. Zwarts, 157–181. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Meinhof, C. 1912. Die Sprachen der Hamiten. Hamburg: Friederichsen.
Musatov, V. N. 2015. Singuljativy s sovremennov russkom jazyke [singulatives in the modern Russian language]. Moscow: Flinta.
Nurmio, Silva. 2019. Grammatical number in Welsh: Diachrony and typology. Vol. 51 of Publications of the philological society. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Nurmio, Silva. 2022. Towards a typology of singulatives: Definition and overview of markers. In Number categories: Dynamics, contact, typology, ed. D. Arbes, 155–182. Berlin: de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110986600-005.
Parsons, Terence. 1979. An analysis of mass terms and amount terms. In Mass terms: Some philosophical problems, eds. Francis Jeffry Pelletier, 137–166. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
Pelletier, F. Jeffry. 1975. Non-singular reference: Some preliminaries. Philosophia 5(4): 451–465.
Pelletier, Francis J. 2012. Lexical Nouns are both +MASS and +COUNT but they are neither +MASS nor +COUNT. In Count and Mass across Languages, eds. D. Massam, 9–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pelletier, F. Jeffry, and Lenhart K. Schubert. 1989. Mass expressions. In Handbook of philosophical logic. Vol. 4: Topics in the philosophy of language, eds. D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner, 327–407. Dordrecht: Kluwer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1171-0_4.
Rothstein, Susan. 2010. Counting and the mass-count distinction. Journal of Semantics 27(3): 343–397. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffq007.
Rothstein, Susan. 2017. Semantics for counting and measuring. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shvedova, Natalja J., Nina D. Artjunova, Alexander V. Bondarko, Valerij V. Ivanov, Vladimir V. Lopatin, Igor S. Uluxanov, and Fedot P. Filin. 1982. Russkaja grammatika, Vol. 1. Moscow: Nauka.
Stankiewicz, Edward. 1954. Expressive derivation of substantives in contemporary Russian and Polish. Word 10(4): 457–468. https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.1954.11659541.
Sutton, Peter R., and Hana Filip. 2021. The count/mass distinction for granular nouns. In Countability in natural language, ed. H. Filip, 252–291. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316823774.011.
Timberlake, Alan. 2004. A reference grammar of Russian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Townsend, Charles E. 1975 [1980]. Russian word-formation. Corrected reprint. Columbus, OH: Slavica.
Wągiel, Marcin. 2021. Slavic derived collective nouns as spatial and social clusters. In Formal approaches to number in Slavic and beyond, eds. M. Dočekal and M. Wągiel, 175–205. Berlin: Language Science Press. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5082464.
Wągiel, Marcin, and Natalia Shlikhutka. 2022. A mereotopological account of Ukrainian singulatives. Presentation slides. In Formal description of Slavic languages 15, Berlin.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1988. The semantics of grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the audiences of WCCFL 39, FASL 30, SLE 54, Humboldt University Slavic Linguistic Colloquium, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Linguistic Colloquium and Bar-Ilan Linguistic Colloquium for helpful comments and fruitful discussions. My special thanks go to David Erschler, Ljudmila Geist, Silva Nurmio, Arik Cohen, Maria Gouskova, Marcin Wągiel, Roumyana Pancheva, Zarina Levy-Forsythe, Hana Filip, Ora Matushansky and Yael Greenberg for our conversations and correspondence on different aspects on the investigated suffixes, singulativity and the mass-count distinction. I am also grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. I would also like to thank my consultants on different languages, including Dorota Klimek-Jankowska (Polish), Mladen Uhlik (Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian), Elena Rudskaya, Julia Kelbert, Lilia Kalužskaya, Natalia Bereznikova and others (Ukrainian) and Ayoub Noamane (Moroccan Arabic). All mistakes are my own.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing Interests
There are no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Appendix
Appendix
The singulative and massifier -in/-yn share several morphological properties, listed below. All these properties are reported by Geist et al. (2023) for the singulative -in. The data below comes from Russian.
1. Both suffixes specify the gender of the noun as feminine, independently of the gender of the original, “motivating” noun. Thus, gorox ‘pea’ is masculine and klubnika ‘strawberry’ is feminine, but both gorošina ‘a pea’ and klubničina ‘a strawberry’ are feminine. Analogously, while ovca is feminine for ‘sheep’ and baran is its masculine counterpart, both ovčina ‘sheep leather’ and baranina ‘lamb [meat]’ are feminine. In this respect, the two uses of -in under discussion differ from the identically sounding suffix observed in such nationality-denoting nouns as armjan-in ‘Armenian’: nouns of the latter type are, on the contrary, obligatorily masculine.
2. Both singulative and massifier -in precede (i.e., appear lower than) the diminutive suffix -k as well as the plural marker (-y/-i in the nominative case). Thus, goroš-in-k-a and ovč-in-k-a are acceptable, whereas *goroš-k-in-a and *ov(e)č-k-in-a are not. Turning to the plural form, the plural of the singulative gorošina is goroš-in-y and not *gorosh-y-in. The plural is not easy to get with massifier -in/-yn since the latter creates mass nouns. But some of them can be pluralized with strong contextual support (see (28) and (30a) above), when, e.g., ‘beef’ is coerced to ‘a portion of beef’/‘a steak’, and we get (dve ‘two’) teljat-in-y and not *teljat-y-in. (Again, -in in armjan-in is different, as it is incompatible with either diminutive or plural morphology.) Thus, both suffixes appear below NumP (the locus of the number feature) and, moreover, below the position occupied by the diminutive (SizeP for De Belder 2011; De Belder et al. 2014; DimP for Cinque 2015). Given that diminutives are known to occupy the outermost position within the derivational domain (e.g., Manova 2015), both types of -in must appear quite low in the structure.Footnote 23
3. Both singulative and massifier -in can combine with bound roots, e.g., *bužen – buženina ‘baked ham’ (massifier)Footnote 24 or *možževel – možževelina ‘juniper berry’ (singulative). This points to their low position (they attach at the root-level) and, moreover, suggests that they function as nominalizers, as they turn a category-less root into a noun. This hypothesis is consistent with the fact that they determine nominal gender, a property characteristic of n0 (Kramer 2015).
The above-listed facts suggest that both singulative and massifier -in/-yn bear the same gender feature, occupy a relatively low position (plausibly that of n0) and fulfill the nominalizing function. Together with the fact that both make a semantic contribution related to the mass/count distinction, these generalizations suggest that a uniform approach is desirable.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Kagan, O. The Slavic suffix -in/-yn as partition shifter. Nat Lang Semantics 32, 35–63 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-023-09212-1
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-023-09212-1