ordinal interrogatives

[Frans Plank]

Here's an interim summary on ordinal interrogatives.

1.  They are commoner than you think--or rather, than I thought.
	Thanks everybody for spreading such useful knowledge.
	Incidentally, Albanian has them, too.  In many grammars that I
checked in vain over the weekend I bet you anything they inadvertently
escaped the grammarian's attention.

2.  However, they are never basic expressions.

3.  They are always based on quantity interrogatives ('how much/many?') and
always utilize the morphology of ordinal numerals, itself sometimes drawing
on superlative morphology.  Hence:
	(a)  If there are ordinal interrogatives, then there are quantity
interrogatives (but not vice versa).
	(b)  If there are ordinal interrogatives, then there are ordinal
numerals formed from cardinal numerals (but not vice versa).

4.  They are easy to create, given the prerequisites:  You just extend
ordinal morphology from cardinal numerals to quantity interrogatives.

5.  A language having the means necessary to create them, namely quantity
interrogatives and ordinal morphology, may still hesitate to do so for
essentially two reasons:
	(a)  quantity interrogatives are only insufficiently entrenched
themselves (as in English, where they consist of a manner interrogative and
a multal quantifier, just like any combination of 'how' and an adjective,
whereas in German this combination is arguably univerbated, with the
quantifier tending to lose its inflection and with stress typically on the
interrogative part, as per compound word stress);
	(b)  the communicative need to create them is not so urgent, since
the same job--more or less, though perhaps not quite as precisely-- can
also be done by quantity interrogatives themselves or also by quality
interrogatives.  Thus, Finns in elevators might simply ask "Which floor?",
and under the circumstances will rarely be misunderstood as asking about
the floor the elevator currently is at;  or instead of asking (i) I might
more simply ask (ii):

(i)	Das wie-viel-t-e Schnitzel frisst du jetzt gerade?
	'The how-many-th schnitzel are you devouring right now?'
(ii)	Wie-viel-e Schnitzel hast du schon gefressen?
	'How-many schnitzel have you already devoured?'

What is at issue in this conversation is the the specification of the
cardinality of a quantity.  In (i), when asking about the point in a
sequential ordering of items that has by now been attained, and when giving
the appropriate answer (e.g., "the sixth"), the quantity is specified by
implication--who is currently eating a sixth schnitzel will, when (s)he is
done with it, have eaten six schnitzels.  In (ii), the request is to
specify the quantity directly, and should an item be added to it, its
position in the sequence will be the n+1'th.  Perhaps there is some
uncertainty here as to whether a current item is to be included in the
cardinality of the set:  If someone who is just eating another schnitzel
answers question (ii) by saying "five", the one currently being eaten may
be the sixth or only the fifth.  Ordinal interrogatives preclude such
ambiguity;  perhaps that's why we have made the negligible effort to create
them.

frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de