Feature GB165: Is there productive morphological trial marking on nouns?

Patrons: Hedvig Skirgård

Description ⇫

Summary

This question concerns a bound grammatical marker of trial number on nouns. The marker should occur with an open set of nouns, not with a restricted set. This feature contrasts with GB319 Is trial number regularly marked in the noun phrase by a phonologically free element? which focuses on the non-bound marking of trial number. For more on bound marking, please see this page. Bound marking of number on nouns derived from other word classes (such as adjectives or verbs) does not suffice for a 1.

Number marking is often fused with marking of other categories, such as definiteness/specificity or gender/noun class. It is possible for the number marker to also signal other functions and be coded as 1, as long as these other functions do not interfere with the number distinctions and as long as number marking is productive and regular.

It can be difficult to determine how obligatory markers of dual, trial and paucal number are since they can often be replaced by plural number marking. If the grammar writers describe the marker as denoting grammatical number and there are several examples, this suffices.

The trial marker may be similar to the numeral for ‘three’, but it is crucial that it is used in a similar morphosyntactic manner to other number markers in the language.

Procedure

  1. Consider the section in the grammar that deals with number or nominal morphology.
  2. If the author describes a bound marker of trial number on the noun that occurs regularly, code 1.
  3. If the only marking of trial number occurs on nouns derived from other word classes (adjectives, verbs, etc.) or on a small subset of nouns, code 0.
  4. If the grammar mentions that trial number is not marked productively, or that it is marked somewhere else than on the noun, code as 0.
  5. If the grammar does not describe number marking at all and you have a reason to believe that the author may have missed it, code ?.
  6. If the grammar does not describe number, you encounter no examples of number marking, and the grammar is otherwise comprehensive, code 0.

Examples

Northwest Kiwai (ISO 639-3: kiw, Glottolog: nort2930)

Trial marking is not common, and since a similar enough meaning can often be expressed with a plural marker, trial is rarely (if ever) described as being obligatory. However, there are instances where trial markers appear on the noun. These trial markers are different from the numeral for ‘three’ (Brown et al. 2016: 25). Kiwai is coded as 1 for this feature.

a. Umi=obi  ro  pusi  p-obodidio      bi=mo 
dog=TRL  NOM cat   DIST.PST-chase  TRL=PL
‘Three dogs chased the cat.’ (Brown et al. 2016: 25)

b. netua ga'u
two   one
‘three (numeral)’ (Brown et al. 2016: 46)

Further reading

Corbett, Greville G. 2000. Number. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

References

Brown, Jason, Alex Muir, Kimberley Craig & Karika Anea. 2016. A short grammar of Urama. Canberra: Asia-Pacific Linguistics.

Morphological number marking

Phonologically free number marking

Number agreement within the noun phrase

Other * GB039 Is there nonphonological allomorphy of noun number markers? * GB041 Are there several nouns (more than three) which are suppletive for number? * GB046 Is there an associative plural marker for nouns?


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Values ⇫

Name Glottocode Family Macroarea Contributor Value Source Comment