Labeling things with numerals in Maltese, Japanese and Wymysorys
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The research on numerals has mainly focused so far on quantifying uses, where the cardinal counts entities denoted by the NP. It is this quantifying meaning what is typically assumed as basic (Kennedy 2015, Rothstein 2017, Ionin & Matushansky 2018). Yet, there are other flavors of numerals including arithmetical and label uses (Bultinck 2005) where numerals do not provide a cardinality, but rather refer to an abstract mathematical entity or an object associated with a particular number. The main aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between the three meanings by examining heavily understudied label constructions across languages, specifically in Maltese, Japanese and Wymysorys (an endemic Germanic language spoken in Wilamowice, Southern Poland; Andrason & Król 2016). I argue that the arithmetical meaning is the numerals' underlying semantic core from which both the quantifying and label meaning are derived. |
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