The form and meaning of numerals
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | I will investigate a number of topics in numeral (morpho-)semantics and corresponding part-whole structures. I will start by situating numerals as linguistic expressions in the more general context of the philosophy of numbers and the psychology of counting and we will look at various uses of basic numerals such as `five’ (1) Five cats meowed. (2) My reasons for saying this are five. (3) Five is a Fibonacci number. (4) Player number five scored a hat-trick (e.g., Bultinck 2005, Rothstein 2017, Bylinina & Nouwen 2020). I will then discuss four semantic treatments of numerals: (i) as determiners in the Generalized Quantifier Theory (Barwise & Cooper 1981), (ii) as cardinal predicates (Landman 2003), (iii) as predicate modifiers equipped with measure functions (Krifka 1989) and (iv) as degree quantifiers (Kennedy 2015) and see how they compare with respect to capturing the variety of meanings in (1)-(4). Next, I will examine cross-linguistic morphological marking patterns suggesting that numerals in fact lexicalize complex syntactic and semantic structures derived from a set of more primitive notions and consider a proposal of a unified morpho-semantic analysis based on combining compositional semantics with Nanosyntax (Wągiel & Caha 2020). Finally, I will explore a diverse, yet still mostly uncharted, land of numerical expressions other than cardinals (with an emphasis on Slavic data), e.g., English multipliers such as `double’ and `two-time’, Polish collectivizers like `dwójka’ (`group of two’), Czech taxonomic numerals such as `dvojí’ (`of two kinds’), and check whether the proposed account can help us to develop a better understanding of their form and meaning. |
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