This question concerns regular marking of trial number in the noun phrase by a marker that is not bound to the noun, but free-standing. The marking should occur with an open set of nouns, not with a restricted set. This feature contrasts with GB165 Is there a productive morphological trial marker on nouns? which focuses on the bound marking of trial number. For more on wordhood and bound marking, please see this page.
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 still be coded as 1, as long as the other functions do not interfere with the number distinction 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.
Futuna-Aniwa (ISO 639-3: fut, Glottolog: futu1245)
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. Futuna-Aniwa makes regular use of articles, and there are separate specific articles for trial (and dual) number. This marker is different from the numeral three (tolu) and triggers 1
The trial article is taka. taka can occur with any substantive in a nominal phrase. Indication of the trial number in the specific article is rare in natural conversation. Either the singular or plural articles may be substituted for taka. (Dougherty 1983: 23)
a. taka fare SPEC.TRL house ‘the three houses’ (Dougherty 1983: 23) b. taka pepa SPEC.TRL book ‘the three books’ (Dougherty 1983: 23)
Corbett, Greville G. 2000. Number. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dougherty, Janet W. D. 1983. West Futuna-Aniwa: An introduction to a Polynesian outlier language. (University of California publications in linguistics, 102.) Berkeley: University of California Press.
Morphological number marking
Phonologically free number marking
Number agreement within the noun phrase
Other
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| 0 | absent | 2016 | |
| 1 | present | 9 | |
| ? | Not known | 107 |
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