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SIL Electronic Book Reviews 2003-005

URL: http://www.sil.org/silebr/silebr2003-005

Number

By Greville G. Corbett

Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 358. hardback $70.00, paper $28.00. ISBN 0521640164 (hardback), 0521649706 (paper).

Reviewed by Joost Zwarts

Utrecht University

The series Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics does the (field) linguist a good service by publishing sound descriptive studies about grammatical topics such as aspect, tense, mood and modality, gender, case, and now this book about number. I was interested in reading the book because of my own work on the number system of Endo, a Nilo-Saharan language in Kenya, which has plural nouns without formal marking and singulative suffixes to derive singular nouns from these. Unfortunately, this is not one of the main concerns of the author, but he can hardly be blamed for this, since there is so much else about number that deserves attention when the net is cast worldwide.

After an introductory chapter, Corbett shows that there are more number values in language than just singular and plural. We find also languages with general number (one common form for singular and plural), dual (two), trial (three), paucal (few), and greater number (many). These values form a Number Hierarchy. For example, there is no language that does not have dual nouns without also having plural nouns. Corbett argues that the simple linear hierarchy (singular > plural > dual > paucal/trial) needs to be replaced by a binary branching structure.

Another hierarchy, the Animacy Hierarchy, is the main principle of chapter 3 and chapter 4, where Corbett shows that the (pro)nouns marked by a particular number value in a language always correspond to a top segment of the hierarchy 1 > 2 > 3 > kin > human > animate > inanimate. For example, there are languages that have a plural distinction for humans only, but there are no languages where inanimate forms are marked for number but not animate forms.

Number can be expressed in many different ways (chapter 5). For example, a noun can be marked as plural by a separate word (Tok Pisin ol lida ‘leaders’), agreement (this sheep-those sheep), inflection (room-rooms), changes in the stem (goose-geese), reduplication (Malay kanak-kanak ‘children’), or suppletion (person-people).

Chapter 6 is mainly about number agreement, the matching of number on different elements, typically between a noun and a verb, and about mismatches in agreement, as in The committee have decided, which has semantic rather than syntactic agreement. Interestingly, a hierarchy that Corbett proposed in earlier studies about gender agreement, the Agreement Hierarchy, proves useful here too for characterizing where semantic agreement may obtain, namely higher on the hierarchy attributive < predicate < relative pronoun < personal pronoun. The demonstrative, an attributive element, still requires syntactic agreement: this/*these committee.

Number can be used in ways that are not related to plurality in the semantic sense, as in the polite French pronoun vous, which is plural but can be used for addressing one person. In addition to this honorific use of the plural, Corbett discusses a range of other uses in chapter 7, including the evasive use of they in English to avoid reference to gender.

Verbal number, as opposed to nominal number, is the topic of chapter 8. There can be marking on the verb to indicate a plurality of events (nyar ‘chew’ versus nyaraanyar ‘keep chewing’ in Endo) or participants involved in the event (the two verbs for ‘run away’ in Endo, wiis for one person and mwër for more persons). Corbett gives criteria to recognize this phenomenon and compares it to nominal number.

In a final chapter with conclusions and challenges Corbett discusses matters of history (the rise and fall of number), interactions with other categories (like the neutralization of the number distinction in the third person in some languages), the role of frequency, and the acquisition and psycholinguistics of number. The book has a long list of references and three indices, for authors, languages, and subjects.

Since there are hardly any languages in which number does not play a role, either in the noun or in the verb system, there is no doubt that this book, or rather, parts of it, will be highly useful for field linguists. The book’s accessibility to a wide linguistic audience is guaranteed by its descriptive, theory-neutral approach.