Sums, Groups, Genders, and Polish Numerals
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Slavic Grammar from a Formal Perspective. The 10th Anniversary FDSL Conference, Leipzig 2013 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Linguistics |
| Keywords | numerals; plurality; collectivity; distributivity; gender inference |
| Description | It has been recently observed by Dočekal (2012, 2013) that Slavic numeral morphology seems to reflect some of the shifting operators postulated in kind-oriented and plurality-oriented theories of Chierchia (1998) and Landman (2000). Although Dočekal presents convincing novel data and captures semantic differences between different classes of Czech numerals, his analysis does not explain in detail how meanings of morphologically complex numerals derive. In this paper I argue in favor of the compositionality of derivationally complex numerals counting objects in Slavic on the basis of Polish data. Following Wągiel (2014), I propose that it is always the root that defines the cardinality of counted entities, different suffixes, however, modify the meaning of a numeral by introducing additional semantic information, specifically they determine what type of objects a numeral counts. |