Explaining asymmetries in number marking

Singulatives, pluratives, and usage frequency

Dados Bibliográficos

ID3987536
AutoresMartin Haspelmath (0000-0003-2100-8493, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, autor correspondente), Andres Karjus (0000-0002-2445-5072, University of Edinburgh)
Ano2017
Volume55
Fascículo6
Data de publicação2017-01-27
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoLinguistics (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0024-3949 • E-ISSN: 1613-396X
EditoraWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/ling-2017-0026
OpenAlexW2768583293
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas20
Referências citadas10

This paper claims that crosslinguistic tendencies of number marking asymmetries can be explained with reference to usage frequency: The kinds of nouns which, across languages, tend to show singulative coding (with special marking of the uniplex member of a pair), rather than the more usual plurative coding (with special marking of the multiplex member), are also the kinds of nouns which tend to occur more frequently in multiplex use. We provide crosslinguistic coding evidence from a range of languages from different families and areas, and crosslinguistic corpus evidence from five languages, using large written corpora. Thus, the crosslinguistic pattern of singulative vs. plurative coding is a special instance of the tendency to devote more marking to rarer forms, and can be explained by the grammatical form-frequency correspondence principle

Coding (social sciences) · Linguistics · Noun · Statistics · Computer Science · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Philosophy · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation