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« Reminder from the Node | Main | UUSLAW»
Syntax Reading Group
The Syntax Reading Group will hold its final meeting of the semester today (December 7) at Rajesh's house in Northampton. There will be two student presentations:
- Cherlon Ussery: LSA Annual Meeting practice talk on case optionality in Icelandic control (abstract)
- Youri Zabbal: The Syntax of Complex Numerals (abstract below)
The Syntax of Complex Numerals
Youri Zabbal
The compositional nature of complex numerals like four thousand and six suggests they are built up in the syntax. There is additional evidence of a purely syntactic sort in languages like Modern Standard Arabic, Russian, Greek, and Finnish, that strongly supports this conclusion. These languages have intricate agreement patterns within the numeral noun phrase that cannot be accounted for if complex numerals are assumed to be atomic. An example from MSA is given in (1).
| (1) | daxal-a | 'arba9-at-u | 'aalaaf-in | wa- | sitt-at-u | rijaal-in |
| enter.PERF-3M | four-FS-NOM | thousand.M.PL-GEN | and | six-FS-NOM | man.M.PL-GEN | |
| '4006 men entered' | ||||||
Oddly enough, with two exceptions (Hurford 1975, 1987, 2003) and Ionin and Matushansky (2004), the literature ignores complex numerals altogether. Yet once the idea that complex numerals have internal structure is entertained, their description becomes vastly more complicated.
Assuming a minimalist framework, I will discuss a model that accounts for numeral-internal agreement in MSA. I will also present arguments against the current account in Ionin and Matushansky (2004) that uses a cascading nominal structure and right-node raising to describe similar facts in Russian. My goal is not only to provide a syntactic account of complex numerals but also to ensure an easy transition to a semantic theory of numeral expressions (something seemingly impossible in the alternative theory).