Number and Quantification

[DAVID GIL]

A few words on Marcel Erdal's comments on our posting on
numerals and number.

Marcel's conclusion is as follows:

>Summing up, I believe that we do not have numerals here, but
>collective nouns coming from numerals, and referring to groups
>meant to be recognized as such by the addressee.

As I see it: well yes, the forms in question may indeed be "collective
nouns" with the semantics that he describes.  But it still makes sense
to consider them as a particular type of numeral.

Cross linguistically, things that we would have no hesitation to refer
to as simple numerals, may be nouns in one language, verbs in
another, adjectives in a third, while constituting a grammatical class
of their own in a fourth.  Specifically, in Hebrew, numerals
constitute a cline, with lower numerals being more adjective-like,
higher numerals more noun-like -- this is a common pattern, noted
by Greenberg and others.  So calling _SloStenu_ a collective noun
does not conflict with characterizing it is a numeral.

Marcel observes, correctly, that acceptability of the construction in
question drops off after five.  This is true, but, once again, does not
impinge on the characterization of such forms as numerals.  Some
languages don't have numerals after five; while in other languages,
numerals belonging to other, "special" series, tend to have lower
cut-off points.  For example, in English, "They came in threes and
fours" is fine, but "They came in eights and nines" is a little weird.
Similarly, in Hebrew, there are no special ordinal numeral forms for
higher numerals, the ordinal form coalesces with the cardinal form.
However, traditional terminology still refers to such alternative
forms as distributive, or ordinal NUMERALS.

Anyway, the original point of the posting was somewhat different,
namely to establish whether forms such as _SloStenu_ were more
like numerals or more like trials -- and I gather Marcel Erdal agrees
that _SloStenu_ is probably not insightfully characterized as a trial
pronoun.

Finally, I am puzzled by one item in Marcel's data:

> Firstly, with initial stress,
> (1) $lo$-t-enu
> can also mean 'ALL three of us'

This I find very curious.  I can't imagine any way of
putting initial stress on the form in question -- the only possible
stress on this word (or for that matter any word suffixed with _-
enu_ is penultimate.  I really can't imagine where Marcel got this
from.  (All his other Hebrew data seem alright.)

Best wishes,

David