NUM has a legal feature type Number=Sing. Can it have Number=Plur?

[AngledLuffa]

An example of a NUM with Number=Plur feature in English is in PUD, where 2000s is labeled

however, the other English treebanks label that as a NOUN and not a NUM anyway, so perhaps the English one needs an edit!

[AngledLuffa]

UniversalDependencies/UD_English-PUD#58

[AngledLuffa]

OTOH, the Spanish treebanks appear to have used Number= to decide if something is 1, or literally everything else, with Plur and Sing having the obvious usages

Chinese doesn't have any Number features on any NUM tags

that exhausts the languages I am even a little familiar with

[dan-zeman]

Using Number to distinguish 1 from the other cardinal numerals (and perhaps also separating 2, if the language has Number=Dual) is not too enlightening but it might be marginally useful to signal agreement if the counted noun must be in plural form (that is not the case in all languages that have plural nouns). Or if the counted noun will not use plural form in the presence of a number > 1, but something else, like the predicate, will.

A different layer of Number for cardinal numerals would be if they themselves can have singular and plural forms. This is possible in some languages with high-value numerals like thousand-thousands, million-millions. These words behave almost like nouns, so language-specific guidelines may also decide that they should be NOUN, but if they are NUM, then the Number feature makes sense for them.

[rueter]

Hi, @AngledLuffa !
Finnish uses the «Number=Plur» feature with NUM in various contexts
(1) equivalents of ‘hundreds of cats’; kymmeniä kissoja ‘tens of cats’, ‘zillions of cats’;
(2) some cases require a plural stem, such as the Finnish instrumental: tehdä jotain [kaksin] käsin. ‘do something [with two] hands’ ;
(3) words referencing sets, e.g., yhdet sakset ‘one pair of scissors’
@flammie @nikopartanen @jpiitula
can you add something to this.

[flammie]

There's always this "mennään yksille" structure, probably used more widely as 'lets get one(s) each' kind of thing, but primarily about pints.

I don't know what the UD policy on this is, but I have always found it a bit weird when a morphological or inflectional feature gets re-used as lexical feature, I'm guessing it comes from different parsing framework / linguistic theory, to have kind of agreement or unifying between numerals lexical number and nouns. Finnish numeral phrases agree in (morphological) number between the numeral and the noun.