The contribution of our paper is thus twofold. First, it documents the phenomenon of the singulative operation in the Galilee dialect of Palestinian Arabic. Second, we show that the singulative operator is predictably constrained in what nouns it applies to, and that the output of the operation varies depending on the properties of the denotation of the input noun - whether it denote liquids, granular substances, solid matter or a collection of individuals. To the best of our knowledge, while the singulative operation is recognized as part of Modern Standard Arabic grammar as well in at least some dialects, this kind of systematic semantic mapping between denotation of the input and denotation of the output has not yet been carried out before.

It is often assumed that plurality and countability are necessarily related. One way of expressing this might be as follows: Counting the number of cats involves determining how many individual cats there are. “There are four cats on the sofa” is true if the plural individual on the sofa is made up of four discrete, non-overlapping single individual cats. It is thus natural that the set of individual cats is grammatically salient and marked in contrast to the plural set. Since we do not count mud, and mud does not come in inherently individuable stable units, there is no set denoting single units of mud and the singular/plural contrast is not relevant. In We ordered here two coffees, three beers and one water the plural marker indicates that the noun has shifted to a count interpretation. Theories differ as to why mud is mass and why, unlike coffee or water, it cannot shift to a count interpretation, but the assumption that the lack of countability and the lack of pluralization are related is pretty widely assumed. The goal of this paper is to explore the relation between countability and plurality, especially in examples like the one with two coffees, three beers, one water.