Number from a syntactic perspective : Why plural marking looks 'truer' in French than in Korean

This paper is a contribution to a general theory of grammatical number, based on comparative evidence from French and Korean. We argue that the Korean plural is no more 'optional' in Korean than it is in French: in both languages, the lack of number specification in the noun phrase triggers similar semantic effects. However, the Korean plural marker deul does differ from the French plural in both its distribution and its interpretation, a contrast we propose to derive from the fact that deul is a cardinality-type lexeme, whereas the French plural spells out an inflectional feature.