AW: AW: word order of cardinals

[bingfu Lu]

Dear Mathew,
  Thanks for your valuable feedback!
  We may to check Sino-Tibetan:MIRISH: Gallong, which may be called Jiarong in Mandarin.  Could you please tell us the relevant source of references?
     
  I am very interested in your data as follows:
  AdjN&OrdN  17
  AdjN&NOrd  2
  NAdj&OrdN  9
  NAdj&NOrd  46
   
  May the data indicates that in general, ordinals tend to precede N more strongly than adjectives do?  This may follow the principle I called IP (Identifiability Precedence), which states that the more identifiability a modifier contributes to its mother NP, the more it tends to precede. Relevant data includes the following. While most adjectives follow cardinals in English, those that make the mother NPs definite can precede cardinals, such as in ¡®the following/biggest five balls¡¯, ¡®use left three lanes¡¯ (highway sign), ¡®the last/next three pages¡¯.
   
  Best
Bingfu

Matthew Dryer <dryer at BUFFALO.EDU> wrote:  It is not really accurate to say that Greenberg did not distinguish cardinal and ordinal 
numerals. Rather, he followed common usage in using the expression "numeral" to 
denote cardinal numerals. Hence all of his claims about numerals were claims about 
cardinal numerals.

My typological database contains data on the order of ordinal numeral and noun for a 
small number of languages. The numbers of the four possible types for the two orders 
of cardinal numeral and noun and or ordinal numeral and noun are as follows, where 
'Num' denotes a cardinal numeral and 'Ord' denotes an ordinal numeral:

NumN&OrdN 17
NumN&NOrd 14
NNum&OrdN 7
NNum&NOrd 31

While the type NNum&OrdN is the least frequent, it is by no means rare, since there are 
only twice as many (14 versus 7) of the type NumN&NOrd.

The seven languages I code as NNum&OrdN are as follows, where the first item, not in 
all caps, is the name of the family, the second item, in caps, is the name of the genus, 
and then a list of the languages in that genus with this order:

Niger-Congo:ADAMAWA-UBANGIAN: Gbeya Bossangoa, Linda, Zande.
Afro-Asiatic:BIU-MANDARA: Gude.
Sino-Tibetan:MIRISH: Gallong.
Trans-New Guinea:EASTERN HIGHLANDS: Yagaria.
Trans-New Guinea:AWJU-DUMUT: Kombai.

As Thomas Stolz noted, the order of ordinal numeral and noun more closely follows the 
order of adjective and noun. The relevant data is:

AdjN&OrdN 17
AdjN&NOrd 2
NAdj&OrdN 9
NAdj&NOrd 46

In other words, in 17+46=63 languages out of 74 (or 85%), the ordinal numeral occurs 
on the same side of the noun as the adjective. Compare this with the fact that 48 out of 
69 languages (or 70%) place the ordinal numeral on the same side of the noun as the 
cardinal numeral. Or, put differently, an ordinal numeral is twice as likely to occur on 
the opposite side of the noun from the cardinal numeral (30%) as it is to occur on the 
opposite side of the noun from the adjective (15%).

Matthew Dryer

Quoting bingfu Lu :

> Dear Thomas,
> Thanks for your informative message!
> Your information is consistent with our data.
> What we are interested most is the likely implicational universal
> as follows:
> If ordinal numeral precedes the head noun, cardinal numerals do as
> well.
> 
> What we request for are, first, whether the universal is valid in
> your data;
> second, whether the universal has been proposed in the literature;
> third, the respective numbers of languages of OrdN-CardN, NOrd-NCard
> and OrdN-NCard (and OrdN-CardN if any).
> 
> If ordinals behave more adjective-like than cardinals, then, the
> proposed universal is quite expectable, according to Greenberg¡¯s
> Universal 18 (When the descriptive adjective precedes the noun, the
> demonstrative and the numeral, with overwhelmingly more than chance
> frequency, do likewise). 
> Greenberg does not distinguish cardinal and ordinal numerals here.
> Our current investigation is based on the distinction of the two
> kinds of numerals. A further question is whether ordinals are
> descriptive. ¡®First, second¡¯ may be if interpreted as ¡®primary,
> secondary¡¯, but how about other ordinals?
> In passing, we are investigating the relative order between
> cardinals and ordinals when they both co-occur on the same side of
> the noun. Our expectation that if both precede, the order is always
> Card-Ord-N, while both follow, both order are possible, following the
> pattern of adjectives and numerals in general. 
> 
> We hope we can find some answer to our inquiries in the literature
> you mentioned, which we are still looking for.
> 
> Best
> Bingfu 
> 
> 
> Thomas Stolz wrote: v\:*
> {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} 
> w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape
> {behavior:url(#default#VML);} 
> st1\:*{behavior:url(#default#ieooui) } Dear Bingfu,
> 
> thanks a lot for your answer. Yes, I noticed that there were typos
> in the original mail.
> 
> The higher degree of adjective-like properties of ordinals as
> opposed to cardinals is quite wide-spread. For instance, in my native
> German, only the cardinal ONE behaves like an adjective (agreement in
> case and gender) whereas the bulk of the cardinals is indeclinable.
> However, all and each ordinal has to agree in gender, case and number
> with its so-called head noun. Note that in German, cardinals and
> ordinals precede the noun.
> 
> More or less the same picture can be found in other SAE-like
> languages such as Italian (ONE is like an adjective, from TWO upwards
> cardinals remain uninflected whereas [ideally] all ordinals inflect
> for gender and number according to the agreement rules; in addition,
> Italian cardinals precede the noun whereas ordinals may be positioned
> pre-nominally [= preferred position] as well as post-nominally [=
> marked position under very particular conditions] ¨C and thus behave
> syntactically a bit more like Italian adjectives which are normally
> in post-nominal position).
> 
> I am pretty sure that you¡¯ll encounter many such cases throughout
> (¡°Indo-¡°)Europe. Have a look at Romance, Germanic, Celtic for that
> matter (as you already know the Slavic data). By the way, I forgot to
> tell you that in our project on the Grammar of Ordinaly at the
> university of Bremen, there are two more people involved, viz. my
> assistant-to-be Maxim Gorshenin and at Stockholm University, Ljuba
> Veselinova with whom I have been working on ordinals for quite some
> time.
> 
> Please keep in touch and let us know what you have found out about
> ordinals in the languages of the area you are scrutinizing.
> 
> Best wishes.
> 
> Thomas
> 
> 
> Prof. Dr. Thomas Stolz
> Universität Bremen
> FB 10: Linguistik
> PF 330 440
> D-28 334 Bremen/Germany 
> 
> 
> ---------------------------------
> 
> Von: bingfu Lu [mailto:lubingfu at yahoo.com] 
> Gesendet: Montag, 20. August 2007 17:02
> An: Thomas Stolz; Linguistic Typology; Renping Jiang
> Betreff: Re: AW: word order of cardinals
> 
> 
> Dear Thomas,
> 
> Sorry, there is two typos in my previous posting:
> 
> The title of the posting should be ¡°word order of ordinals¡±,
> not ¡°cardinals¡±.
> 
> ?lt;o:p>
> 
> We want to know the possible counterexample and relevant
> literature and data in other languages.
> 
> In addition, in some languages, ordinals morphologically belong
> to adjectives, such as Russian.?
> 
> 
> 
> In Russian, ordinals are more adjective-like than cardinals in
> the sense that all ordinals are morphologically adjective but not all
> cardinals.?What we really want to know is that is there any other
> languages than Slavic where ordinals are more adjective-like than
> cardinals.
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks for your information of the literature, which is most
> important and helpful to our?investigation!
> 
> 
> What you said about the particularity of number ¡®one¡¯ (even if
> ordinals precede the noun, the cardinal ONE may follow the noun) is
> totally consistent with our data. Many languages in China behaves
> like Maltese in this aspect.?Renping may tell you which languages.?
> 
> 
> Best
> 
> Bingfu 
> 
> 
> 
> Thomas Stolz wrote: 
> Dear colleagues,
> 
> 
> 
> at the university of Bremen, we are currently conducting a
> large-scale crosslinguistic study of the grammar of ordinal numerals.
> We also look at word-order issues and word-class membership problems
> of numerals. First of all, cardinal numerals behave like adjectives
> in loads of languages ¨C especially Indo-European ones. However, this
> is often true only of a certain sub-set of the cardinals (lower
> cardinals as opposed to higher ones, digits as opposed to decimal
> values, etc.). Thus, there is a difference between Latvian and
> Lithuanian on the one hand and Greek on the other: Latvian and
> Lithuanian treat most of their numerals as adjectives when it comes
> to agreement while Greek has agreement only for numerals including
> the digits 1, 3 and 4. Details can be found in the work by Hurford,
> Veselinova and my own. For the latter see:
> 
> 
> 
> Stolz, Thomas. 2001. d?„Ordinalia ¨C Linguistisches
> Neuland. Ein Typologenblick auf die Beziehung zwischen Kardinalia und
> Ordinalia und die Sonderstellung von EINS und ERSTER.¡°, in Was ich
> noch sagen wollte¡­ A multilingual Festschrift for Norbert Boretzky
> on occasion of his 65th birthday, herausgegeben von Birgit Igla &
> Thomas Stolz (= Studia Typologica 2). Berlin: Akademie-Verlag,
> 507-530. 
> 
> 
> 
> Stolz, Thomas. 2002. „Is ‚one¡® still ‚one¡® in
> ‚tewnty-one¡®? On agreement and government properties of
> cardinal numerals in the languages of Europe.¡°, Sprachtypologie und
> Universalienforschung 55, 354-402. 
> 
> 
> 
> STOLZ, Thomas & VESELINOVA, Ljuba. 2005.
> 
> „Ordinal numerals.¡°, in: The World
> Atlas of Language Structures, edited by Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S.
> Dryer, David Gil & Bernard Comrie. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
> 218-221.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Please note that there are also interesting problems on the
> micro-level: even if ordinals precede the noun, the cardinal ONE may
> follow the noun (this is the case in Maltese, for instance). 
> 
> 
> 
> Good luck with the project and keep me informed
> 
> 
> 
> Thomas Stolz
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Prof. Dr. Thomas Stolz
> 
> Universität Bremen
> 
> FB 10: Linguistik
> 
> PF 330 440
> 
> D-28 334 Bremen/Germany
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ---------------------------------
> 
> Von: Discussion List for ALT
> [mailto:LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG] Im Auftrag von bingfu Lu
> Gesendet: Samstag, 18. August 2007 17:16
> An: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
> Betreff: word order of cardinals
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dear colleagues,
> 
> 
> One colleague of mine is investigating the word order of
> ordinal numerals. Based on her database of 112 languages in China,
> she got the following implicational universal: If ordinal numeral
> precedes the head noun, cardinal numerals does as well. Her data as
> shown below:
> 
> 
> Ord-N & Card-N 53
> 
> 
> N-Ord & N-Card 52
> 
> 
> N-Ord & Card-N 15
> 
> 
> N-Ord & N-Card 0
> 
> 
> (some languages has two order, therefore, the total numbers of
> languages above is larger than 112).?We want to know the possible
> counterexample and relevant literature and data in other languages.
> 
> 
> In addition, in some languages, cardinals morphologically
> belongs to adjectives, such as Russian.?We also need to know other
> languages where cardinals morphologically as adjectives.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Replies to this inquiry can be send to my colleague Renping
> Jiang (renpingjiang at 126.com) and me.
> 
> 
> If correspondents is enough, we will make a summary.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Bingfu Lu
> 
> 
> Institute of Linguistics
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

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