The morphosemantics of Spanish indefinites

Abstract

I analyze the Spanish indefinites algún and algunos as a paucal and a greater paucal determiner, respectively, contrary to the common assumption that views the former as singular and the latter as plural. I use Harbour’s  (2014) feature [±additive], and the possibility of repeating that feature, in order to do so. I propose a transparent word-internal compositional analysis of the two determiners, where alg- contributes [−additive] to both of them. I discuss consequences for the semantics of morphological plurality in nouns and for the analysis of ignorance implicatures.