Number Marking and Noun Categorization in Nilo-Saharan Languages  

Oleh:

Dimmendaal, Gerrit J.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Anthropological Linguistics (ada di JSTOR) vol. 42 no. 2 (Mar. 2000), page 214-261.
Fulltext: Vol. 42, No. 2, pp. 214-261.pdf (4.5MB)

Isi artikel

Number marking on nouns is an inflectional category that languages apparently can do without. On the other hand, some languages or language families tend to have extremely rich number-marking systems. The Nilo-Saharan family provides a case in point. Here, we find a predominating classificatory technique that appears to be relatively rare in other language families (with the exception of neighboring Afroasiatic languages), consisting of singulatives, plurals, and a set of replacement markers. This article describes formal and semantic properties of this system from synchronic and diachronic points of view and explains its historical relative stability in Nilo-Saharan. Although few formal parallels for this type of number inflection are found elsewhere in the world, clear-cut functional parallels exist.

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