pluraladjacent

Pluraladjacent is a term used in linguistics and natural language processing to describe patterns in noun phrases where plural marking or plural-related elements appear in close proximity to the noun head. The concept focuses on the physical adjacency between the head noun and the plural marker, whether that marker is a suffix, a separate clitic, or a nearby quantifier that signals plurality within the same phrase.

Two common senses are recognized. Morphological adjacency refers to plural marking that attaches directly to the noun stem, such as a suffix or clitic that follows the stem without intervening words. Syntactic or determiner-adjacent usage covers cases where plurality is expressed by elements positioned very close to the noun—such as numerals or demonstratives that accompany the noun within the same noun phrase—so the plurality meaning is tightly bound to the head noun.

In typology, pluraladjacent patterns vary across languages. Some languages employ bound plural morphemes that immediately attach to the noun, while others use separate words or clitics that still yield a tightly linked plural interpretation. The concept is often used to describe information structure and morphosyntactic alignment in noun phrases, and to contrast cases with intervening modifiers versus tightly bound plural markings.

In corpus linguistics and NLP, pluraladjacent can be used as a feature to analyze noun phrase structure, assist in parsing decisions, and improve morphosyntactic tagging for languages with variable plural marking. It serves as a convenient shorthand for describing how closely plural information associates with the noun head in a given construction.

See also: plurality, noun phrase, morphosyntax, dependency grammar.