Numerals and the theory of number

English and Albanian as members of the Indo-European trunk of languages undoubtedly share certain characteristics, common for all members of this family of languages, but as two structurally different languages, they also show significant differences. The main aim of this paper is to highlight not only some of the differences, but also similarities in regard to the grammatical category of number in English and Albanian nominal system. The paper is based on various English and Albanian grammar books, written by prominent authors, which provide an abundance of data examined through the contrastive method. The results indicate that nouns in these two languages show differences which concern several aspects of the grammatical category of number. Some of these differences concern the way these two languages treat nouns in the singular and plural number, the ways of forming the plural number, and their usage with articles and numerals. One essential difference, however, concerns the collective and compound nouns which show an almost complete discrepancy in these two languages due to the ways they write these nouns, and the ways these nouns function in these languages. Nevertheless, in spite of the differences, there are also some similarities that concern mainly the ways of forming the plural number, but also the group of nouns used only in the singular called " singularia tantum " , and those used only in the plural " pluralia tantum " .

2006

This paper advances the case that linguistics requires a unified theory of number, serviceable to both semantics and morphology, by proving that the morphological concept of augmentation and the semantic concept of cumulation are near logical equivalents. From this emerge an inventory of number features incorporating the categories ‘paucal’ and ‘unit augmented’, a typology of number systems crosslinguistically, and indication of other areas of likely convergence between semantic and morphological research.

2010

The main objective of this paper is to investigate the nominal system of Turkish with particular reference to number. Following Schroeder (1999) and Corbett (2000), I will propose that bare nominals in Turkish come out of the lexicon are number-neutral. In other words, the ...

International journal of environmental and science education, 2016

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Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 2015

Inspired by Partee (2010), this paper defends a broad thesis that all modifiers, including numeral modifiers, are restrictive in the sense that they can only restrict the denotation of the NP or VP they modify. However, the paper concentrates more narrowly on numeral modification, demonstrating that the evidence that motivated Ionin & Matushansky (2006) to assign non-restrictive, privative interpretations to numerals – assigning them functions that map singular sets to sets containing groups – is in fact consistent with restrictive modification. Ionin & Matushansky (2006)’s argument for this type of interpretation is partly based on the distribution of Turkish numerals which exclusively combine with singular bare nouns. Section 2 demonstrates that Turkish singular bare nouns are not semantically singular, but rather are unspecified for number. Western Armenian has similar characteristics. Building on some of the observations in section 2, section 3 demonstrates that restrictive modi...

Number is an important aspect of lexical syntax. While there has been substantial research devoted to number agreement at the level of the sentence, relatively less attention has been paid to the representation of number at the level of individual lexical items. In this paper, we propose a representational framework for the lexical syntax of number in spoken word production that we believe can account for much of the data regarding number in noun and noun phrase production. This framework considers the representation of regular and irregular nouns, and more unusual cases such as pluralia tantum (e.g. scissors), zero plurals (e.g. sheep) and mass nouns (e.g. garlic). We not only address bare noun production but also the production of determiner + noun phrases. While focusing on examples from English, we extend the framework to include languages with grammatical gender such as German.

1992

In this paper we provide cross-linguistic evidence for a functional projection between D & NP, which we call Number Phrase (NumP). In a full noun phrase, the head of this projection is, among other things, the locus of number specification (singular or plural) of a noun phrase. Pronominal noun phrases are distinguished from full noun phrases by the fact that they lack a lexical projection, i.e. they lack a NP. The existence of two distinct functional categories predicts the existence of at least two classes of pronouns, those of the category D, and those of the category Num. In both Modern Hebrew and Haitian, there is evidence that this prediction is borne out.

Number interacts with two distinct processes in language: Quantization and Individuation. In Individuation, an operation that maps a nominal concept to the individual objects that materialize it, the role of number is to provide a criterion of division mapping properties onto object instances. But contextual localization, we argue can provide an alternative criterion of division. That is, just as objects can be individuated through their properties or their location in space (Xu and Carey 1996), so, we propose, can Carlsonian kinds be mapped onto object level realizations through number division or spatial location. Languages opt for different modes of individuation a choice that has empirical consequences on nominal syntax and morphological number marking.

Across languages, plural marking on a noun typically conveys that there is more than one entity in the denotation of the noun. In English, this 'more than one' meaning is generally regarded as an implicature on top of a 'semantically unmarked'/number-neutral literal meaning of the plural noun ([10, 18, 20]; see also [5, 12]). In Turkish, however, it is controversial whether plural nouns should be analysed as number-neutral or whether they should directly denote strict plurality [2, 19, 6]. This debate is important as it can shed light on the meanings number marking can have across languages, thereby constraining cross-linguistically adequate theories of the semantics of number. We tested Turkish-speaking adults and 4–6-year-old children on the interpretation of plurals in upward-and downward-entailing contexts, as compared to the 'not all' scalar inference of bazı 'some'. The results of our experiment support a theory of plural nouns which includes a number-neutral interpretation.

Acta Linguistica Academica, 2021