Number (review)

Almost a decade after his 1991 monograph Gender, a category which he then referred to as ‘the most puzzling of the grammatical categories’, Greville Corbett has delivered a study of ‘the most underestimated of the grammatical categories’ (1). Leaving aside the attitudes towards this category linguists may have had, this characterization is undoubtedly adequate in that the book fills a gap in the same way its predecessor did. It is presented, moreover, in the readable, user-friendly fashion one would expect from the author. It is certainly fair to claim that the study of number will no longer be the same now that we are provided with an invaluable background that cannot be ignored by any linguist approaching the issue from whatever perspective.

Number contains an introduction, seven major chapters, and a conclusion, followed by separate indexes to cited authors, languages, and subjects. Ch. 2, ‘Meaning distinctions’, first approaches number from a semantic viewpoint: ‘keeping the noun still’, it investigates all the possible number values, resulting in a typology of the number distinctions found in the world’s languages, including unfamiliar number values such as ‘paucal’ or ‘greater plural’. Interestingly, alleged cases of quadrals cited in the literature are shown to be merely instances of ‘paucal’. C’s typology makes use of implications: There cannot be more indeterminate (paucal, ‘greater plural’) than determinate (singular, dual, trial) values, and if some values are facultative, they will be the lowest ones on the number hierarchy.

Accordingly, Ch. 3, ‘Items involved in the nominal number system’, ‘keeps the number value still’ and explores which nominals can be number-marked. This results in a discussion of number splits, the distinction between count and mass nouns, as well as the relation between associative meaning and plural. In general, the likelihood of number marking being realized is greater for nominals higher on the animacy hierarchy than for those lower. This enables C to comprehensively account for the ubiquitous role of obligatoriness and optionality of number marking in many systems in a concrete way.

Ch. 4, ‘Integrating number values and the animacy hierarchy’, combines the results of the two previous chapters by questioning which number values can appear at which positions on the animacy hierarchy. The chapter confirms the expectation that number values are not distributed randomly across the hierarchy; rather, for nominals at the higher positions of the hierarchy, more number values are found than for those at the lower positions. Possible counterexamples include ‘minor numbers’, which are considered unproblematic since they affect only a small proportion of nominals, and associatives, distributives, and collectives, which are all shown not to be basic number values in the same sense as singular and plural. Another issue highlighted in this chapter concerns languages which use a different system at the lower end of the hierarchy than on the higher end. C allows for these systems by introducing the notions of ‘top’ and ‘second’ system. Chs. 2–4 form a coherent block, and we consider C’s account of the uneven distribution of number marking with respect to both number values and semantic noun types one of the most important merits of this book.

Ch. 5, ‘The expression of number’, discusses the strategies of marking number values and suggests a typology in terms of lexical means (viz. number words or clitics), syntax (viz. agreement), and morphology. Eventually, some intricate cases are dealt with that concern several markers which in combination yield a dual interpretation: ‘constructed’ number in, for example, Hopi, where the concept of dual is signaled by the morphological ‘singular’ form of the pronoun combined with the ‘plural’ form of the verb, and inverse number systems as found in Kiowa- Tanoan languages. As a matter of fact, in an explicit account of Kiowa-Tanoan, Steins (2000) handles the meaning level of number values flexibly by allowing for a language-specific interpretation of the category ‘singular’ as including the cardinality ‘2’ in addition to ‘1’. It thus captures the system with a minimal amount of features, without having to refer to the...