AW: word order of cardinals

[Thomas Stolz]

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 –
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 – 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,

I 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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