Building cardinal numerals across languages
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| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The paper proposes a unified morpho-semantic account for the typological variation in form and meaning of cardinal numerals. We investigate the morphological marking of different types of cardinals across languages and argue that one can identify cross-linguistically stable semantic ingredients, which compositionally provide the attested patterns. We adopt the framework of Nanosyntax as a model of morphology which, when applied to the structures we propose, delivers the relevant marking patterns. The model is based on the idea that the meaning components are uniformly structured across languages and they must all be pronounced, though languages differ in how they pronounce them. All cardinals share an underlying scale but differ in a number of operations subsequently applied to that scale. |
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