Nombre individuales y colectivos: una propuesta de definición basada en pruebas sintácticas

Abstract

Different linguists in the past have proposed several definitions of collective nouns looking only at their meaning, criterion that operates in some cases but not in many others. As a consequence, nobody in my knowledge has given until now a rigorous definition of collective nouns. The definition I’m proposing in this paper is based upon syntactic criteria. Previously the paper shows different discoveries, among them the following: a) Spanish preposition entre has two very different values and meanings; and b) There are three classes of collective nouns: compact heterogeneous nouns, porous heterogeneous nouns and porous homogeneous nouns, as the fourth possibility (compact homogeneous nouns) are false collectives as they are individual nouns.