User:John Stephenson/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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Plural


Greenberg 1966: 28 - "The singular
frequently has no overt mark while the plural is marked by affix as in English,
except for plurals of the type 'sheep'.  A more careful statement would
therefore be that in no language is the plural expressed by a morpheme which
has no overt allomorph, while this is frequently true for the singular."
Kershaw  http://www.umich.edu/~archive/linguistics/linguist.list/volume.4/no.251-300
"First of all, in Polish (Zadrozny) and Russian (Bar-Lev, Cienki) some nouns,
but not all (Zadrozny is unclear on this point), exhibit a phonetically null
plural.  There are three numbers in these languages (and in Ukrainian, which I
know something about):  singular, paucal, and plural.  The singular is used for
one, the paucal for two/three/four, and the plural for five-twenty.  At
twenty-one, the cycle is repeated, although the way the cycle repeats differs
between languages (at least, it appears to).  At any rate, in Russian, genitive
feminine and neutur nouns have affixes only on singular and paucal; e.g.:
    odno jabloko, dva jabloka, pjat' jablok
    one apple, two apples, five apples
(data from Cienki).  Other nouns, though, exhibit the opposite behavior:
    odin dom, dva doma, p'at' domov
    one house, two houses, five houses
(data from Bar-Lev).  The issue is further complicated by the fact that these
morphemes are, after all, fusional (as Ringe notes)."
http://urts120.uni-trier.de/glottopedia/index.php/Number

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