Syntactic Differences of Plurality Markers

There are two crucial syntactic differences found among plurality markers. Dependent plurals and anti-quantifiers work at the phrasal level as opposed to ordinary plurals that apply to the lexical level. More specifically, ordinary plurals are adjoined to the X level while anti-quantifiers attach to the full-fledged XP level. Dependent plurals, however, have the in-between status syntactically and combine with the X'-structure. Another difference is found between ordinary plurals and dependent plurals, on the one hand, and anti-quantifiers, on the other, in the respect that the former is a morpheme while the latter is a phrase that can take its own complement. These different statuses seem to account for why plural forms are intrinsically ambiguous whereas anti-quantifiers are unambiguously more expressive in their semantics as well as in their syntax than ordinary plurals and dependent plurals.