How to count pluralia tantum in Polish

Among Polish nouns, pluralia tantum-i.e. nouns that lack a singular form-form a distinct group, especially in terms of the specific requirements that the language standard places on their quantifiers: they must be quantified using a special type of numerals, so-called collective numerals. However, since collective numerals are used only rarely, native speakers are not well-acquainted with their inflectional paradigm; this leads to various compensatory strategies which speakers resort to in order to avoid these problematic numerals, replacing them with analytic constructions (e.g. dwie pary wrót instead of dwoje wrót). In the first part of the thesis, the author reviews what is currently known about quantification patterns of Polish pluralia tantum, drawing mostly on articles by Polish linguists Zygmunt Saloni and Anna Andrejczuk. In the second, experimental part, the author explores data extracted from the National Corpus of the Polish Language, aiming to uncover the strategies of pluralia tantum quantification actually employed by speakers of Polish. Apart from periphrastic constructions, she finds that cardinal numerals are also frequently used, which directly contradicts the language standard. Though the standard may require it, the usage frequency of collective numerals seems to be on the..