Numerals and their Position in Universal Grammar

نویسنده

  • Mark Donohue
چکیده

One of Greenberg’s claims concerning the appearance of numerals as modifiers concerns the order of the elements, suggesting that post-nominal numerals are “favored in indefinite and approximate constructions”. Examining a small but representative body of data from a variety of languages, and one of the common grammaticalisation targets of singular numerals, the indefinite article, we conclude that the generalisation does not have a universal status, and exists at best as a statistical universal.

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تاریخ انتشار 2005