pluralizer

From pluralize +‎ -er.

pluralizer (plural pluralizers)

1. A pluralist; A clergyman who holds multiple offices. (Can we verify⁽⁺⁾ this sense?)
2. (grammar) A syntactic marker that indicates something is plural; a plural marker.
   • 1973, Hans Cristoph Wolfart, Plains Cree, page 49:

     In verbs, where it occupies suffix position 5, its occurrence as pluralizer of a third person expressed by a prefix is highly restricted; cf. 5.451. Instead, in verbs, it seems on the way to becoming a person marker (rather than a mere pluralizer) for the second person plural exclusive;

   • 2000, John Holm, An Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles, page 215:

     The pluralizer is most frequently used with animate nouns, but this is not always the case, e.g. Nigerian PE 'dè nyám dḝm ' 'the yams'.

   • 2022, Rudolf P.G. De Rijk, Standard Basque: A Progressive Grammar, page 118:

     The evidence in chapter 15 suggests that the suffix -z is the unmarked pluralizer; yet , of our six verbs , only two take it .

3. Someone or something that highlights or embodies plurality, diversity, or multiple perspectives; an agent or proponent of pluralism.
   • 2009, Leo Bersani, Homos, page 104:

     It is after all Freud—with his confusing picture of inversion's genealogy in the first few pages of the Three Essays, especially in footnotes added in 1910, 1915, and 1920—who can be considered the first pluralizer of homosexuality.

   • 2012, Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism, page 131:

     Such images, uncannily assimilating TV to the numinous, to angelic visitations, or even to death itself, graphically demonstrate the TV functions in postmodernism not just as one pluralizer among others, but as the figure of ontological plurality itself.

   • 2014, Peter Admirand, Loss and Hope, page 168:

     Pluralism is both a process and an intentional mid-point that will involve a multilevel process of public debate on matters of morals, the place of religion in public discourse, and a continual reworking of both the content of liberal values and the methods by which they might be put into practice. This is the distinction between the pluralist and the pluralizer.

   • 2016, Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts, page 128:

     Rather than a philosopher or a pluralizer, I may be more of an empiricist, insofar as my aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness) .