I've encountered the term 'singulative'. I'm not entirely sure what it
means, nor if it's germane to this group, but here goes.
AHD4 gives this:
http://bartleby.com/61/87/S0428725.html
Salikoko Mufwene gives interesting if not entirely clear discussion of
English as a 'singulative language'. I don't understand what he means
by "numeral classifying languages".
http://babel.ling.upenn.edu/~nagy/nwav/WWWabs/Mufwene.html
Someplace in my reading I remember seeing a comment that some
langauges treat their nouns as intrinsically plural (or collective),
unless modified in some way to make them explicitly singular. This
seems no more and no less logical that making nouns singular in their
base form. Compare this turnabout to the Melanesian sibling kinship
terms where the words are 'same-sex-as-ego-sibling' and
'opposite-sex-of-ego-sibling' instead of the more usual
'male-sibling', 'female-sibling'.
Anyway. At the bottom of this post is the question of why IE has
grammatical number in the first place (I think Glen would say
it's inherited from Nostratic).