It is rare for a language to have no linguistic number at all, since a ‘one–many’ opposition is typically implied at least in pronouns, where the category of person discriminates the speaker as ‘one.’ Beyond pronouns, number is typically a property of nouns and/or determiners, although it can appear on other word classes by agreement. In other cases, number opposes a reading of ‘one’ to a reading as ‘not one,’ which includes masses when the ‘one’ reading is morphologically derived from the ‘not one,’ it is called a singulative. In the core contrast, number allows languages to refer to ‘many’ through the description of ‘one’ the sets referred to consist of tokens of the same type, but also of similar types, or of elements pragmatically associated with one named individual. Number marking can apply to a more or less restricted part of the lexicon of a language, being most likely on personal pronouns and human/animate nouns, and least on inanimate nouns. As a linguistic category it has a morphological, a morphosyntactic, and a semantic dimension, which are variously interrelated across language systems. Number is the category through which languages express information about the individuality, numerosity, and part structure of what we speak about.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |