Groceries ‘grocery items’, clothes and cattle lack singular counterparts and are reported as unmodifiable by small numerals. Alongside that, Allan (1980) reports cattle as modifiable by 500.

The hypothesized existence of speakers who judge {#2, 500} cattle makes correct corpus predictions. In iWeb (Davies 2018–), six plural nouns without singular counterparts are modified by multiples of 5 significantly more than inflectional plural (near-)synonyms: Cattle-cows, swine-pigs, livestock-farm animals, poultry-birds, fowl-birds and munitions-weapons.

In my analysis, speakers who judge {#2, 500} cattle can embed cattle in a classifier phrase headed by the null classifier [CL ∅], which based on data from classifier languages is assumed to be compatible with 500 but not 2. This restriction is hypothesized to come from [CL ∅] appealing to the innate system of representing approximate magnitudes (Feigenson et al. 2004); its meaning includes the estimation function EST (Li & Rothstein 2012), whose input is a plurality and whose output (for humans who know symbolic numbers) is a (culture-specific) round number. I therefore predict that numeral modification of nouns like cattle is licensed by estimation, and I will solicit feedback for a planned experiment designed to check this prediction.