Wikidata:Property proposal/Grammatical number

Grammatical number edit

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Lexemes

DescriptionGrammatical number category (singular, plural, etc.) of pronouns and certain types of nouns
Representsgrammatical number (Q104083)
Data typeItem
DomainLexemes with grammatical category personal pronoun (Q468801), pronoun (Q36224), or mass noun (Q489168) (and possibly plurale tantum (Q138246) if understood as part-of-speech)
Allowed valuessingular (Q110786), plural (Q146786), dual (Q110022) and any other language-specific grammatical number features
Example 1I (L487)singular (Q110786)
Example 2we (L483)plural (Q146786)
Example 3measles (L227474)plural (Q146786) (mass plurale tantum noun)
Example 4שמיים/שָׁמַיִם (L68414)plural (Q146786) (mass plurale tantum noun)
Example 5أنتماdual (Q110022)
Sourcehttps://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/features/morphosyntactic/number/

Motivation edit

As discussed in the property proposal for "Grammatical person", grammatical properties which apply to a lexeme as a whole (i.e. to all its forms) should be stated on the lexeme, rather than repeated on every form. Thus, according to this logic, personal pronouns which have a fixed grammatical person feature should state it on the lexeme level through this property. The same applies for nouns (such as mass nouns or pluralia tantums) which have a single number form (singular or plural).


Note that this property has been suggested before but rejected due to the idea that this is not a property of lexemes but rather of forms. However, as stated above, it is a property of personal pronouns, insofar they exhibit a fixed grammatical person feature, as well as of certain nouns (typically mass nouns) which admit only a single number feature. As a general rule, whenever a grammatical feature can applies to all forms of a lexeme, it should probably be elevated to a lexeme-level statement. AGutman-WMF (talk) 11:44, 10 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion edit

@AGutman-WMF, VIGNERON:   Done --Fralambert (talk) 03:49, 13 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]