Cov, the Underspecified Noun, and Syntactic Flexibility in Hmong
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4960211 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Martha Ratliff (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1991 |
| Volume | 111 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 694 |
| Publication date | 1991-10-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the American Oriental Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-0279 • E-ISSN: 2169-2289 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/603400 |
| OpenAlex | W2319141092 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 2 |
Hmong (Miao) is a Southeast Asian language characterized by classifier constructions. As a rule, there can be only one classifier per noun phrase. There exists a class of seeming exceptions to this rule, however: when the collective classifier cov is used with a semantically underspecified noun, the unit classifier is retained. I argue that these are not truly exceptions, but that the unit classifier in this environment must be analyzed as the first member of a nominal compound. Syntactic flexibility is characteristic of the language as a whole, and is better supported than any of the following alternative analyses: (a) reformulation of the phrase structure rule for NPs, (b) the consistent analysis of unit-classifier/underspecified-noun collocations as nominal compounds, (c) the analysis of cov as a quantifier, or (d) the analysis of the classifiers that pattern with underspecified nouns as representing two homophonous lexical items, one a classifier and the other a noun, which are related through a process of synchronic derivation
Flexibility (engineering) · Linguistics · Nominalization · Noun · Computer Science · History · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy
| Citations per year | 0.17 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2003 - 2025 (23) |
| Highly cited | No |