Plural marking, indefiniteness, and the noun phrase

Abstract

This article proposes that plural marking on nouns in Persian is licensed only if those nouns are contained within D/QPs. This proposal accounts for why plural‐marked nouns are construed as definite unless an overt marker of indefiniteness appears, and why plural marking does not cooccur with numerals unless the noun phrase is definite. It is also shown that the indefinite marker in Persian is quantitative rather than cardinal and is thus associated with higher functional structure within the noun phrase than in English. In English, on the other hand, number marking, the indefinite article, and the grammatical distinction between count and mass nouns, are all realized at the level of NumP. Differences in the interpretation of bare noun phrases in English and Persian are therefore explained by the claim that argument noun phrases must minimally be NumPs in English while Persian lacks this projection altogether.