Grammatical number

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For other uses of "number", see number (disambiguation).

In linguistics, grammatical number is a morphological category characterized by the expression of quantity through inflection or agreement. As an example, consider the English sentences below:

That apple on the table is fresh.

Those two apples on the table are fresh.

The number of apples is marked on the noun —"apple", singular number (one item) vs. "apples", plural number (more than one item) — , on the demonstrative, "that/those", and on the verb, "is/are". Note that, especially in the second sentence, this information can be considered redundant, since quantity is already indicated by the numeral "two".

A language has grammatical number when its nouns are subdivided into classes according to the quantity they express, such that:

Every noun belongs to a single number class. (Number partitions nouns into disjoint classes.)
Noun modifiers (such as adjectives) and verbs have different forms for each number class, and must be inflected to match the number of the nouns they refer to. (Number is an agreement category.)

This is the case in English: every noun is either singular or plural (a few, such as "fish", can be both, according to context), and at least some modifiers of nouns — namely the demonstratives, the personal pronouns, the articles, and verbs — are inflected to agree with the number of the nouns they refer to: "this car" and "these cars" are correct, while "*this cars" or "*these car" are ungrammatical.

Not all languages have number as a grammatical category. In those that do not, quantity must be expressed either directly, with numerals, or indirectly, through optional quantifiers. However, many of these languages compensate for the lack of grammatical number with an extensive system of measure words.

The word "number" is also used in linguistics to describe the distinction between certain grammatical aspects that indicate the number of times an event occurs, such as the semelfactive aspect, the iterative aspect, etc. For that use of the term, see "Grammatical aspect".

[edit] Semantic vs. grammatical number

All languages are able to specify the quantity of referents. They may do so by lexical means with words such as English a few, some, one, two, five hundred. However, not every language has a grammatical category of number. Grammatical number is expressed by morphological and/or syntactic means. That is, it is indicated by certain grammatical elements, such as through affixes or number words. Grammatical number may be thought of as the indication of semantic number through grammar.

Languages that express quantity only by lexical means lack a grammatical category of number. For instance, in Khmer, neither nouns nor verbs carry any grammatical information concerning number: such information can only be conveyed by lexical items such as khlah 'some', pii-bey 'a few', and so on.^[1].

Most languages of the world have formal means to express differences of number. The most widespread distinction, as found in English and many other languages, involves a simple two-way number contrast between singular and plural (car / cars; child / children, etc.). Other more elaborate systems of number are described below.

[edit] Number in specific languages

[edit] English

Main article: English plural

English is typical of most world languages, in distinguishing only between singular and plural number. The plural form of a word is usually created by adding the suffix -(e)s. Common exceptions include the pronouns, which have irregular plurals, as in I versus we, because they are ancient and frequently used words.

[edit] French

In its written form, French declines nouns for number (singular or plural). In speech, however, the majority of nouns (and adjectives) are not actually declined for number. This is because the typical plural suffix -(e)s, is silent, and thus does not really indicate a change in pronunciation; the plural article or determiner is the real indicator of plurality (but see liaison for a common exception). However, plural number still exists in spoken French because a significant percentage of irregular plurals differ from the singular in pronunciation; for example, cheval "horse" is pronounced [ʃəval], while chevaux "horses" is pronounced [ʃəvo].

[edit] Hebrew

In Hebrew, most nouns have only singular and plural forms, such as sefer/sfarim "book/books", but some have singular, plural, and dual forms, such as yom/yomaim/yamim "day/two days/days". Some words occur so often in pairs that what used to be the dual form is now the general plural, such as ayin/eynayim "eye/eyes," used even in a sentence like, "The spider has eight eyes." Adjectives, verbs, and pronouns have only singular and plural, with the plural forms of these being used with dual nouns.

[edit] Obligatoriness of number marking

In many languages, such as English, number is obligatorily expressed in every grammatical context; in other languages, however, number expression is limited to certain classes of nouns, such as animates or referentially prominent nouns (as with proximate forms in most Algonquian languages, opposed to referentially less prominent obviative forms). A very common situation is that plural number is not marked if there is any other overt indication of number, as for example in Hungarian: virág "flower"; virágok "flowers"; hat virág "six flowers".

[edit] Number agreement

[edit] In verbs

In many languages, verbs are conjugated for number. Using French as an example, one says je vois (I see), but nous voyons (we see). The verb voir (to see) changes from vois in the first person singular to voyons in the plural. In everyday English, this often happens in the third person (she sees, they see), but not in other grammatical persons, except for the verb "to be".

Verbs may agree with the number of nouns to which they refer, even when there is no other form of number agreement in a language. For more information on this special type of number agreement, see Grammatical person, Verb, and English verbs.

[edit] In other lexical items

Adjectives often agree with the number of the noun they modify. For example, in French, one says un grand arbre "a tall tree", but deux grands arbres "two tall trees". The singular adjective grand becomes grands in the plural, unlike English "tall", which remains unchanged.

Other determiners may agree with number. In English, the demonstratives "this", "that" change to "these", "those" in the plural, and the indefinite article "a", "an" is either omitted or changes to "some". In French and German, the definite articles have gender distinctions in the singular but not the plural. In Spanish and Portuguese, both definite and indefinite articles are inflected for gender and number, e.g. Portuguese o, a "the" (singular, masc./fem.), os, as "the" (plural, masc./fem.); um, uma "a(n)" (singular, masc./fem.), uns, umas "some" (plural, masc./fem.)

Thus, for example in the Finnish sentence Yöt ovat pimeitä "Nights are dark", each word referring to the plural noun yöt "nights" ("night" = yö) is pluralized (night-PL is-PL dark-PL-partitive).

[edit] Exceptions

Sometimes, grammatical number will not represent the actual quantity. For example, in Ancient Greek and in Sanskrit, neuter plurals took a singular verb. The plural form of a pronoun may also be applied to a single individual as a sign of importance or respect, as in the pluralis majestatis and in the T-V distinction, found in many languages, or, in English, when using the singular "they" for gender-neutrality.

[edit] Collective nouns

Related article: English collective nouns.

A collective noun is a word that designates a group of objects or beings regarded as a whole, such as "flock", "team", or "corporation". Although many languages treat collective nouns as singular, others may interpret them as plural. In British English, phrases such as the committee are meeting are common (the so-called agreement in sensu "in meaning", that is, with the meaning of a noun, rather than with its form). The use of this type of construction varies with dialect and level of formality.

[edit] Types of number

[edit] Singular versus plural

Main article: Plural

In most languages with grammatical number, nouns, and sometimes other parts of speech, have two forms, the singular, for one instance of a concept, and the plural, for more than one instance. Usually, the singular is the unmarked form of a word, and the plural is obtained by inflecting the singular. This is the case in English: car/cars, box/boxes, man/men. There may be exceptional nouns whose plural is identical to the singular: one fish / two fish.

[edit] Collective versus singulative

Main article: Collective number

Some languages differentiate between a basic form, the collective, which is indifferent in respect to number, and a more complicated derived form for single entities, the singulative, for example Japanese and some Brythonic languages. A rough example in English is "snowflake", which may be considered a singulative form of "snow" (although English has no productive process of forming singulative nouns, and no singulative modifiers). In other languages, singulatives can be productively formed from collective nouns; e.g. Standard Arabic حجر ḥajar "stone" > حجرة ḥajarā "(individual) stone", بقر baqar "cattle" > بقرة baqarā "(single) cow"

[edit] Dual number

Main article: Dual number

The distinction between a "singular" number (one) and a "plural" number (more than one) found in English is not the only possible classification. Another one is "singular" (one), "dual" (two) and "plural" (more than two). Dual number existed in Sanskrit, Ancient Greek and Gothic, and it is common in the Slavic languages and in the Semitic languages, for example.

[edit] Trial number

The trial number is a grammatical number referring to 'three items', in contrast to 'singular' (one item), 'dual' (two items), and 'plural' (four or more items). Tolomako, Lihir and Tok Pisin (a creole language, though only in the pronouns) have trial number.

There is a hierarchy among the categories of number: No language distinguishes a trial unless having a dual, and no language has dual without a plural (Greenberg 1972).

[edit] Nullar number

Some languages, such as Latvian, have a nullar form, used for nouns that refer to zero items.

Other languages use either the singular or the plural form for zero. English, along with Germanic and most Romance languages, uses the plural. French normally uses the singular, instead.

[edit] Paucal

Paucal number, for a few (as opposed to many) instances of the referent (e.g. in Hopi, Warlpiri and in Arabic for some nouns). See Plural, for some examples.

[edit] Distributive plural

Distributive plural number, for many instances viewed as independent individuals (e.g. in Navajo).

[edit] Inverse number

The languages of the Kiowa-Tanoan family have three numbers — singular, dual, and plural — and exhibit an unusual system, called inverse number (or number toggling), of marking number. In this scheme, every countable noun has what might be called its "inherent" or "expected" numbers, and is unmarked for these numbers. When a noun appears in an inverse ("unexpected") number, it is inflected to mark this. For example, in Jemez, where nouns take the ending -sh to denote an inverse number, there are four noun classes, as follows:

class	description	singular	dual	plural
I	animate nouns	-	-sh	-sh
II	some inanimate nouns	-sh	-sh	-
III	other inanimate nouns	-	-sh	-
IV	mass (non-countable) nouns	(n/a)	(n/a)	(n/a)

As can be seen, class-I nouns are inherently singular, class-II nouns are inherently plural, class-III nouns are inherently singular or plural. Class-IV nouns cannot be counted and are never marked with -sh. From (Sprott 1992, p. 53)

A similar system is observed in Kiowa (Kiowa is distantly related to Tanoan languages like Jemez):

class	singular	dual	plural
I	-	-	-gɔ
II	-gɔ	-	-
III	-ɡɔ	-	-ɡɔ
IV	(n/a)	(n/a)	(n/a)

[edit] Formal expression of number

Synthetic languages typically distinguish grammatical number by inflection. (Note that analytic languages, such as Chinese, don't have grammatical number.) Below are some examples of number affixes for nouns (where the inflecting morpheme is underlined):

Affixes (such as suffixes, prefixes, simulfixes)
- Slovenian: lipa "linden" (singular) — lipi "linden" (dual) — lipe "linden" (plural)
- Swahili: mtoto "child" (singular) — watoto "children" (plural)
- Arabic: كِتَاب kitāb "book" (singular) — كُتُب kutub "books" (plural)
Reduplication
- Indonesian: orang "person" (singular) — orang-orang "people" (plural)
- Somali: buug "book" (singular) — buug-ag "books" (plural)

In most languages, the singular is formally unmarked, whereas the plural is marked in some way. Other languages, most notably the Bantu languages, mark both the singular and the plural, for instance Swahili (see example above). The third logical possibility, rarely found in languages, is unmarked plural contrasting with marked singular. An alleged example of this situation is Desano, a Tucanoan language of Colombia. Cf. gasi "canoes" vs. gasiru "canoe"; yukü "trees" vs. yukügü "tree".^{[citation needed]}

Elements marking number may appear on nouns and pronouns in dependent-marking languages or on verbs and adjectives in head-marking languages.

English (dependent-marking)	Western Apache (head-marking)
Paul is teaching the cowboy.	Paul idilohí yiłch’ígó’aah.
Paul is teaching the cowboys.	Paul idilohí yiłch’ídagó’aah.

In the English sentence above, the plural suffix -s is added to the noun cowboy. In the Western Apache, a head-marking language, equivalent, a plural prefix da- is added to the verb yiłch’ígó’aah "he is teaching him", resulting in yiłch’ídagó’aah "he is teaching them" while noun idilohí "cowboy" is unmarked for number.

[edit] Number particles

Plurality is sometimes marked by a specialized number particle (or number word). This is frequent in Australian and Austronesian languages. An example from Tagalog is the word mga: compare bahay "house" with mga bahay "houses". In Kapampangan, certain nouns optionally denote plurality by secondary stress: ing laláki "man" and ing babái "woman" become ding láláki "men" and ding bábái "women".

[edit] Notes

^ See, for example, the Linguistic sketch in Khmer article at UCLA Language Materials project.

[edit] Bibliography

Beard, R. (1992) Number. In W. Bright (ed.) International Encyclopedia of Linguistics.
Corbett, G. (2000). Number. Cambridge University Press.
Greenberg, Joseph H. (1972) Numeral classifiers and substantival number: Problems in the genesis of a linguistic type. Working Papers on Language Universals (Stanford University) 9. 1-39.
Laycock, Henry. (2005) 'Mass nouns, Count nouns and Non-count nouns' Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Elsevier.
Laycock, Henry. (2006) Words without Objects. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Merrifield, William (1959). Classification of Kiowa nouns. International Journal of American Linguistics, 25, 269-271.
Mithun, Marianne (1999). The languages of native North America (pp. 81-82, 444-445). Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-23228-7.
Sprott, Robert (1992). Jemez syntax. (Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, USA).
Sten, Holgar (1949) Le nombre grammatical. (Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague, 4.) Copenhagen: Munksgaard.
Watkins, Laurel J.; & McKenzie, Parker. (1984). A grammar of Kiowa. Studies in the anthropology of North American Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0-8032-4727-3.
Weigel, William F. (1993). Morphosyntactic toggles. Papers from the 29th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (Vol. 29, pp. 467-478). Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Wiese, Heike (2003). Numbers, language, and the human mind. Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-83182-2.
Wonderly, Gibson, and Kirk (1954). Number in Kiowa: Nouns, demonstratives, and adjectives. International Journal of American Linguistics, 20, 1-7.

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