Gendered numerals in Slavic, Arabic and Abkhaz
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Recent research reveals a non-trivial relationship between grammatical gender and quantifica- tion (Arsenijevic ´ 2016, Fassi Fehri 2018). In this paper, we explore the interaction between different uses of cardinals and gender marking patterns in Slavic, Arabic and Abkhaz. We propose a unified morpho-semantic account for the typological variation in form and meaning. We adopt Nanosyntax as a model of morphology which, when applied to the semantic primitives we propose, delivers the relevant marking patterns. The model is broadly 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 of natural numbers but differ in a number of operations subsequently applied to that scale. |
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