Beyond the grammatical looking glass
In my attempt to double-check the appropriate plural of “Starbucks,” I discovered the grammatical concept: “mass noun“…
[Mass nouns] cannot be directly modified by a numeral without specifying a unit of measurement, and that they cannot combine with an indefinite article.
In learning about mass nouns, I came across “cumulative reference“…
If one collection of cutlery is combined with another, we still have “cutlery.” Similarly, if water is added to water, we still have “water.” But if a chair is added to another, we don’t have “a chair,” but rather two chairs. Thus the nouns “cutlery” and “water” have cumulative reference, while the expression “a chair” does not.
and “telicity“…
One common way to gauge whether an English verb phrase is telic is to see whether such a phrase as in an hour, in the sense of “within an hour”, (known as a time-frame adverbial) can be applied to it.
It’s a good thing I didn’t have Wikipedia in college when I used to really geek out on logic, or I would have evolved into a big semantics dork, too.
From what I can tell, there’s a lot of people on the internet wondering what the plural of Starbucks is, but no one has definitively answered the question. I’m sure employees have a convention, but I haven’t seen it. I’d suggest that it’s a defective headless noun, like Red Sox, and its plural would just be “Starbucks.”
