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In:The Diachrony of Word Class Peripheries
Edited by Tanja Ackermann and Christian Zimmer
[Studies in Language Companion Series 238] 2025
► pp. 17–59

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Chapter 2
Diachronic evidence for Spanish object mass nouns as a peripheral category

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Published online: 7 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.238.02kle
Abstract
In languages with obligatory plural marking object mass nouns (OMN) such as furniture, i.e. mass nouns referring to discrete entities, seem to be peripheral within the peripheral class of mass nouns. We analyse the paths leading to OMNs, their degree of stability as well as their diachronic tendencies between core and periphery in Spanish. We address these questions on the basis of a historical corpus analysis of selected Spanish OMNs. The analysis is complemented with results from our previous studies on the productivity of word-formation patterns associated with OMNs. We show that the paths of change shed light on their peripheral linguistic status within the category of mass nouns and straddling that of count nouns, while the data does not provide conclusive evidence for a clearly delimited category of OMNs.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: The peripheral status of object mass nouns
  • 2.Properties of object mass nouns in (Modern) Spanish
    • 2.1Count and mass nouns in Spanish (and other Romance languages)
    • 2.2Linguistic properties of OMNs in Spanish
      • 2.2.1Morphosyntactic mass noun properties of OMNs
      • 2.2.2Semantic characteristics of OMNs
    • 2.3SOMNs, POMNs and related noun types
  • 3.Diachronic tendencies of Spanish OMNs: State of the art
    • 3.1Etymological sources of OMNs
      • a.Spanish ropa ‘clothing’
      • b.Spanish gente ‘people’
      • c.Spanish mobiliario ‘furniture’
    • 3.2The diachronic relations between SOMNs and POMNs
    • 3.3The possibility of specialised suffixes for deriving OMNs
    • 3.4Intermediary conclusion: OMNs are outcomes of lexicalisation processes
  • 4.Morphosyntactic changes of OMNs over the centuries: A corpus analysis
    • 4.1Methodology
    • 4.2The case of ropa ‘clothing’
    • 4.3The case of gente ‘people’
    • 4.4The case of mobiliario ‘furniture’
    • 4.5OMNs and their near-synonyms
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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