AW: AW: word order of cardinals

Tue Aug 21 13:41:40 UTC 2007

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 <stolz at UNI-BREMEN.DE> 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 <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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