Mark Volpe: Numeral Quantifiers in the l-node hypothesis (reply to Dan Everett)

[Martha McGinnis]

Hi again,
    Interesting message from Dan. I agree that
morphology and culture interact as I think can be
demonstrated by the following data from Turkish.
    Turkish has 2 interesting suffixes. The first
changes nouns into "professional doers" associated
with the noun, suffixation of an additional morpheme
denotes the field in which the doer is involved.
1) gazete ('newspaper') - gazete-ci (journalist) -
gazete-ci-lik ('journalism').
2) banka ('bank') - banka-ci ('banker') - banka-ci-lik
('banking, i.e., the business'). Now here is where
culture seems to interact with the perfectly
productive morphological process.
3) kitap ('book') - kitapi-ci - kitap-ci-lik.
One might expect that the derivations mean 'writer'
and 'literature', respectively, but in fact they mean
'bookseller' and 'the book business', respectively.
    Beard (1981) has also discussed a suffix in Serbo-
Croatian which when applied to animals indicates the
most culturally relevant part of the animal, so that
'elephant' suffixed would mean 'tusk', 'fox' might
mean 'fur', 'pig' - 'meat', or something to this
effect.
    Getting back to Heidi's anology between light verbs
and NCs. I can really see this. In the languages such
as Persian, mentioned by Heidi, and Piraha, mentioned
by Dan, where the are 80 and upwards light verbs, just
as in NC systems where the numbers are large, one
might say that vs and ns come in different "flavors",
but in the end their effect is very limited, 2 or so
light verbs, singular or plural NCs. Dare I to extend
the analogy, all food, no matter what the flavor,
results in digestion.
                         Mark

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes
http://finance.yahoo.com