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This paper discusses numeral expressions in English. Generally, when power-of-ten words (e.g., hundred, thousand, etc.) are followed by nouns, we do not find a plural morpheme. For example, three hundred students is grammatical, but *three hundreds students is not. Based on this lack of plural agreement, Ahn (2017) recently proposes that numerals with power-of-ten words are compounds based on Donalies’ (2004) argument of compound categorization: since they are compounds, they are not subject to the plural agreement. However, Ahn’s (2017) proposal suffers from the phenomenon that numeral expressions are very productive and infinite. Also, the head with the target structure in Ahn (2017) seems to be counter-intuitive. Additionally, we can find empirical data that some compounds show the plural agreement. In this paper, I argue that numerals with power-of-ten words are not compound, but they are derived in Syntax. The alleged lack of plural agreement is due to the deletion of a plural morpheme -s to prevent an anti-locality violation based on a drastic PF effect in Grohmann (2003). This analysis has many advantages over Ahn (2017). It can easily explain the productivity of numeral expressions. Furthermore, we can maintain the essential plural agreement mechanism in English, which provides more theoretical uniformity.
