Publication details
Number
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | While language faculty (understood as a capacity for grammar and semantics) is unique to humans and has no analogue in the biological world, the number sense, i.e., the mental capacity to manipulate quantities (not necessarily symbolically), is attested also in nonhuman species, and thus it arguably relates to an evolutionary ancient cognitive feature. Therefore, it is not surprising that most of the world's natural languages developed formal means to express the conceptual distinction between "one" and "more than one"; in this respect, Slavic languages are no different. This entry discusses the basic morphosyntactic and semantic properties of Slavic number systems. It introduces the grammatical category of number and discusses its expression across Slavic, focusing first on the singular and the plural and then on the dual. Treated next are markedness and the way in which grammatical number relates to the semantic notions of singular and plural reference. Several types of expressions related to the notion of minor number are also discussed, including collectives and singulatives and so-called count forms in quantifier phrases. |
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