The emergence of attraction errors during sentence comprehension

2.1. GRAMMATICAL NUMBER 17
in the world, a plural noun phrase refers to multiple entities. Richer number systems
provide a more fine-grained division. But grammatical and notional number
do not always go hand in hand. Things that are perceptually conceived as
a singleton can be lexicalized as plural forms (e.g., scissors, trousers). At the
same time, singular forms can refer to collections of entities sharing one property
(e.g., orchestra). Mass nouns like water are another noun class for which notional
number and grammatical number diverge. Since these cases received considerable
attention in the discussion of agreement both in the theoretical literature and the
psycholinguistic literature, they will be considered in some more detail below.
Summation Plurals
So-called SUMMATION PLURALS are nouns which are formally plural words but
denote singleton objects. They often refer to entities with symmetrical parts,
mainly tools and instruments (e.g., scissors, pliers, binoculars, glasses) and clothes
(e.g., trousers, pants, pajamas). Thus, there might be a transparent relation between
the formal plurality and some kind of conceptual plurality. One could argue
that these nouns refer to the two parts which form the object—the two cutting
edges of a pair of scissors or the two trouser legs in the case of trousers. And
indeed, historically this seems to be true, at least for some nouns in this class.
An example is the German equivalent of trousers: Hose originally denoted a single
piece of a pair of chausses which were put on in addition to some kind of
short pants. Later on both clothes were unified to what German speakers call now
Hose (Kluge, 1999). The plural usage survived in some idioms as shown in the
examples below. 5
(4) a. die Spendierhosen anhaben
the donating-trousers wear
‘to be in a generous mood’
b. die Hosen anhaben
the trousers wear
‘to be in charge’ (equivalent to ‘to wear the trousers/breeches’)
c. die Hosen voll haben
the trousers full have
‘to be scared’ (equivalent to ‘to be in a blue funk’)
d. Das
the
Herz rutschte ihm in die Hose(n)
heart fell him into the trousers
‘He lost his courage’ (equivalent to ‘his heart sank into his boots’)
5 Some people consider the plural form in (4d) to be old-fashioned.