Greville G. Corbett

Number might seem a straightforward, even boring, grammatical category, but if there's one thing this books shows very clearly, it is that there's a lot of different ways languages may deal with number, some of them very exotic from the perspective of someone largely familiar with Indo-European languages.

Corbett is chiefly concerned with what one might call qualitative typology; which sorts of number systems exist, and which do not. Quite a few implicational "laws" are formulated, like that show more if a language has a trial number (a special form indicating precisely three of something) it also has a dual (a form indicating precisely two).

I would have liked a bit more attention to quantitative issues. Languages with trials exist, but how common are they? One in ten languages wordwide? One in a hundred? A related annoyance is that Corbett repeatedly says or implies that English is, from a global perspective, rather odd, but he doesn't ever quantify this.

(The standard example of English being weird with regard to number is that the 3rd person singular being the only explicitly marked person-number category of most verbs - the typological expectation is that it would be the one most likely to be unmarked. But just how unusual is the English situation?)

Still, I found it an interesting read. show less

I found this a very interesting survey of gender as a linguistic category.