AW: AW: word order of cardinals

Tue Aug 21 08:56:32 UTC 2007

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] – 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¡±.

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 <stolz at UNI-BREMEN.DE> 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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