Formal approaches to number in Slavic and beyond (Volume 5)

The goal of this collective monograph is to explore the relationship between the cognitive notion of number and various grammatical devices expressing this concept in natural language with a special focus on Slavic. The book aims at investigating different morphosyntactic and semantic categories including plurality and number-marking, individuation and countability, cumulativity, distributivity and collectivity, numerals, numeral modifiers and classifiers, as well as other quantifiers. It gathers 19 contributions tackling the main themes from different theoretical and methodological perspectives in order to contribute to our understanding of cross-linguistic patterns both in Slavic and non-Slavic languages

Subatomic quantification (Volume 6)

The goal of this book is to explore the relationship between the cognitive notion of parthood and various grammatical devices expressing this concept in natural language. The monograph aims to investigate syntactic constructions and lexical categories, e.g., partitives, whole-adjectives, and multipliers, encoding different kinds of part-whole structures both in Slavic and non-Slavic languages. It is envisioned to inspire radical rethinking of the ontology of models accounting for nominal semantics. Specifically, it provides novel evidence for a mereotopological approach to meaning, i.e., a theory of wholes that captures not only parthood but also topological relations holding between parts. This evidence comes from the phenomenon of subatomic quantification, i.e., quantification over parts of referents of concrete count nouns

Syntax of Hungarian

These books aim to present a synthesis of the currently available syntactic knowledge of the Hungarian language, rooted in theory but providing highly detailed descriptions, and intended to be of use to researchers, as well as advanced students of language and linguistics. As research in language leads to extensive changes in our understanding and representations of grammar, the Comprehensive Grammar Resources series intends to present the most current understanding of grammar and syntax as completely as possible in a way that will both speak to modern linguists and serve as a resource for the non-specialist

Monotonicity in a Numeral Classifier language

While many languages require an obligatory plural morpheme to make reference to plural individuals, numeral classifier languages generally do not (Greenberg 1972; Sanches & Slobin 1973; Doetjes 2012: a.o.). This led some researchers to conclude that noun denotations in numeral classifier languages are inherently plural. In this paper, I show that one can find a syntactic environment which requires a plural reading or a mass reading of a noun phrase in a numeral classifier language. The core empirical finding is that the postnominal measurement construction in Japanese (i) does not allow a singular reading, and (ii) sometimes triggers count-to-mass coercion. This suggests that the constraint that measure phrases select a non-quantised denotation (Krifka 1989) is non-trivially satisfied in Japanese even though Japanese is argued to have inherently cumulative common noun denotations. To solve this, I propose two possible analyses. The first option is to assume the stratified measurement reference (Champollion 2017) and the second option is to assume that Japanese distinguishes singular count nouns, plural nouns and mass nouns in its syntax (Watanabe 2006; 2017). I discuss the implications of these options in light of the previous literature and provide further data which may suggest that Japanese makes an atomicity distinction both in its lexicon and its syntax

Counting and Measuring: a theoretical and crosslinguistic account

In this paper, I show that expressions like two glasses of wine are ambiguous between counting and measuring interpretations, and that each interpretation is associated with a different semantic representation. In each interpretation, glasses has a different function. In the counting interpretation, glasses is a relational noun, while in the measure interpretation, glasses is a measure head analogous to litre. This difference leads to a number of grammatical contrasts which can be explained by differences in the grammatical structure. I discuss whether these differences are only semantic or also expressed in the syntactic representation. The assumption that syntax directly reflects semantic interpretation leads to assigning counting NPs and measuring NPs two different syntactic structures: counting NPs are right-branching with two modifying glasses of wine, while in measure expressions the numeral and the measure head form a measure predicate two glasses which modifies the N. I show that in Modern Hebrew and Mandarin counting structures and measuring structures clearly do have different syntactic structures, reflecting the semantic differences between counting and measuring. While the evidence in the case of English is less strong, the assumption that syntax directly reflects compositional syntactic structure results in the same basic syntactic contrasts in English as well

Measures and Counting in Basque

In this paper we show that non-agreeing quantifiers in Basque are conceptuallymeasures. Furthermore, based on the differences between agreeing and non-agreeingquantifiers and observing that the latter do not behave as counters (i.e. they can not appear inNumP position) we propose a new syntactic structure for NPs (building on Borer,2005) where measures head their own functional projection. This functional projection isplaced in between the Classifier Phrase and the Number Phrase. We also show thatnon-agreeing quantifiers are sensitive to the nature of the predicates they associate to and thatMeasure Phrases seem to measure both individuals and events/states, as long as the latterdenote non-trivial part-whole structures. The predicate sensitivity of measuring quantifiersare explained using the monotonicity constraint (Schwarzschild, 2002) and ahomomorphism function (Krifka, 1989; Nakanishi, 2004, 2007)

The Alor-Pantar languages: History and typology (Second edition)

The Alor-Pantar family constitutes the westernmost outlier group of Papuan (Non-Austronesian) languages. Its twenty or so languages are spoken on the islands of Alor and Pantar, located just north of Timor, in eastern Indonesia. Together with the Papuan languages of Timor, they make up the Timor-Alor-Pantar family. The languages average 5,000 speakers and are under pressure from the local Malay variety as well as the national language, Indonesian. This volume studies the internal and external linguistic history of this interesting group, and showcases some of its unique typological features, such as the preference to index the transitive patient-like argument on the verb but not the agent-like one; the extreme variety in morphological alignment patterns; the use of plural number words; the existence of quinary numeral systems; the elaborate spatial deictic systems involving an elevation component; and the great variation exhibited in their kinship systems. Unlike many other Papuan languages, Alor-Pantar languages do not exhibit clause-chaining, do not have switch reference systems, never suffix subject indexes to verbs, do not mark gender, but do encode clusivity in their pronominal systems. Indeed, apart from a broadly similar head-final syntactic profile, there is little else that the Alor-Pantar languages share with Papuan languages spoken in other regions. While all of them show some traces of contact with Austronesian languages, in general, borrowing from Austronesian has not been intense, and contact with Malay and Indonesian is a relatively recent phenomenon in most of the Alor-Pantar region. This is the second edition of the volume that was originally published in 2014. In this edition, typographical errors have been corrected, small textual improvements have been implemented, broken URL links repaired or removed, and references updated. The overall content of the chapters has not been changed