4. Supporting evidence
4.2 Typological evidence
4.2.1 Optimal marking
in Turkish (Kornfilt, 1997; Göksel and Kerslake, 2011) and Hungarian (Csirmaz and Dekany, 2014). Therefore it does not create a major violation and most of these languages could actually belong to category 1 and 3. For category 3 and 6, the absence or redundancy of semantic classification is possible, as explained in the theoretical discussion. Finally for category 4 and 5, the languages involved all have restricted numeral systems, as in Usan up to ten, or Piraha, which is a rare language attested not to have the concept of numerals (Everett, 1986; Corbett, 2000), explaining the lack of grammatical plural markers.
As a summary, the special cases are not real exceptions if applying strict terms. We show this fact in the following sections by analyzing the correlation of numeral classifiers, grammatical genders and grammatical plural markers among category 1-8 and decorticating the evidence and possible violations via language samples.
Following our categorization in Table 6, this step is further divided into three sections:
optimal marking, under-marking and over-marking of countability & noun classification. It is necessary to point out that due to space limitation we only display the most representative examples for each category, while the entire list is written in Appendix 1. Also as a reminder, we propose that 1) numeral classifiers and plural markers are in mutually exclusive, 2) numeral classifiers and genders have the tendency not to co-occur, 3) genders and plural markers may co-occur in high tendency 4) the absence of carriers for the functions of countability and noun classification is plausible but dispreferred. In other words the lack of numeral classifiers, genders and plural markers is possible among languages, nevertheless the tendency is expected to be low.
4.2.1 Optimal marking
Within this section, we analyze categories 1 and 2, which display an optimal marking according to our hypothesis: countability marking and noun classification are both represented once in a language, reaching the equilibrium point on the economy continuum presented in (22). Category 1 includes the languages with grammatical genders and grammatical plural markers but no numeral classifiers. It is expected to be an optimal combination since countability and noun classification are respectively fulfilled by plural markers and genders. The results do support our supposition: 57%
(88/155) of the languages in our database are falling into this type. We display examples from French, Swahili and Arabic in (24). For Arabic, in (24a) we may observe the masculine(M) and feminine(F) gender with their agreement on adjectives, while (24b) displays the change from singular to plural form, neither requiring the
‧
Swahili in (24e-f) the situation is slightly different: in previous studies it is attested that genders (noun classes) in Swahili are fulfilling both noun classification and plural marking via noun classes, as an example in (24e), ‘person’ is marked as class 1, however when becoming plural as ‘people’ it belongs to class 2. In simplified terms we may say that noun class 1 is carrying the feature [+human/-plural] while noun class 2 carries the feature [+human/+plural]. Both classes share the same semantic classification criteria, with the difference that one denotes singular and the second plural. This type of system may create some complications nevertheless it is still in accordance with our main hypothesis that both noun classification and plural marking are fulfilled, as explained in Table 1 within the literature review section: mass nouns still do not take plural marking, as opposed to count nouns which do.(24) Co-occurrence of genders and plural markers but absence of numeral classifiers a. Gender in Arabic
e. Singular/plural and gender in Swahili (Bantu) (Thompson & Schleicher, 2001:39)
m-tu wa-tu
class1-person class2-person
‘person’ ‘people’
‧
Category 2 is also optimal according to our hypothesis: the languages included are not attested to have grammatical gender or plural marking system but do have numeral classifiers. Therefore, both countability and noun classification are carried by the numeral classifier and no double-marking occurs among these two functions. As expected by our hypothesis, it is also the second high-ranked category: 18% (28/155) of the languages in our database display the presence of numeral classifiers plus the absence of grammatical genders and grammatical plural markers. As an example, in (25a) with Chinese we note that numeral classifiers are obligatory when the noun is combined with numeral. The similar situation occurs with Japanese and Assamese in (25b) and (25c).
(25) Occurrence of numeral classifiers but absence of genders and plural markers a. Chinese
One interesting point is that genders plus plural markers languages overwhelm numeral classifiers languages in term of quantity: in our data the mismatch among the optimal-marking categories is 57% (88/155) – 18% (28/155). Actually, a similar pattern is found within the existent cross-languages study on numeral classifiers: in Gil (2013)’s study on 400 languages, only 35% (140/400) are attested to have numeral classifiers, whether optional or obligatory, while 65% (260/400) do not. Moreover, within the world near 7000 languages, the biggest database on numeral classifiers from Professor Her’s syntax lab at NCCU contains near 500 numeral classifier languages, which is still showing that numeral classifiers are not the biggest tendency worldwide speaking, displaying a ratio of 7% (500/7000). It is out of the scope of this study to provide an explanation for this observation, since our major focus is to
‧
國立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
35
demonstrate the distribution of specific elements within languages. Nevertheless, we follow Her (2015)’s study on languages in SMATTI (Sinitic, Miao-Yao, Austro-Asiatic, Tai-Kadai, Tibeto-Burman, and Indo-Aryan) and speculate that this is related to political landscape. In other words, category 1 and category 2 are actually two different systems in competition, and due to their different historical development, whether in terms of migration or economy, the gender plus plural marker system became more prominent in Europe and other western countries. On the other hand, in Asia, numeral classifier languages are stronger culturally and economically, therefore most of the languages also adopted numeral classifiers. Further details are provided in the GIS section, but as a reminder this is only preliminary speculation. It is not the main focus of our study and further research needs to be done to verify this hypothesis.