Simon Davies | Re: La singular o la plural con zero?

• Autor: Simon Davies (“simon.franova”)
• Tema: Re: La singular o la plural con zero?
• Data: 2011-07-31 12:09
• Mesaje: 3379 (a supra, presedente, seguente)

I agree with George that both the singular and plural are
acceptable after "zero" and "no", but I think there's a
subtle difference in emphasis.

Consider:

(a) Tu ave zero mesajes.

(b) Tu ave zero mesaje.

Sentence (b) strikes me as being more emphatically negative
than sentence (a). "Zero mesaje" suggests "no an un mesaje"
(not even one message), whereas "zero mesajes" feels like a
more neutral answer to the question "cuanto mesajes me ave?"

Note that we say "cuanto mesajes" and not "cuanto mesaje".
This suggests that the plural is the default in expressions
of quantity for countable objects.

With uncountable nouns (typically names of substances), the
plural is never used. So for a word like "mone" the only
possibilities are "cuanto mone me ave?" and "tu ave zero mone".

Nonetheless, a lot of uncountable nouns can do double duty and
be used in a countable sense (denoting individual "pieces" of
a substance) as in "du cafes, per favore". There's then a
useful distinction to be had between "zero cafe" (no coffee,
no quantity of the substance called coffee) and "zero cafes"
(no coffees, no individual cups or servings of coffee).

Simon