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Complex numerals in English: constituents or not?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2022

CHUANSHENG HE  and
ONE-SOON HER Open the ORCID record for ONE-SOON HER [Opens in a new window]
CHUANSHENG HE
Affiliation:
Department of English and Institute of Language and Cognition, School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University, Changsha City, Hunan Province, China
ONE-SOON HER*
Affiliation:
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan, Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan
*
(Corresponding author) [email protected]
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Abstract

This article focuses on the controversy over whether complex numerals in English are constituents. Contra the traditional view (e.g. Hurford 1975; Greenberg 1990 [1978]), the cascading structure proposed in Ionin & Matushansky (2006, 2018) maintains that cross-linguistically a complex numeral does not form a constituent to the exclusion of the NP complement. The derivation of an additive complex numeral, e.g. twenty-two people, thus involves an underlying source form with a nominal conjunction, e.g. twenty people and two people. Based on the argumentation established in He (2015) and He et al. (2017) supporting complex numerals as constituents in Chinese and minority languages in southern China, this article first demonstrates that the non-constituency analysis is not viable for English, as the underlying forms of additive complex numerals may be ill-formed and also not semantically equivalent to the surface forms. We then offer evidence to support the constituency analysis from constituency tests and behavior of post-numeral and pre-numeral modifiers. Finally, we demonstrate that the extra mechanism of grafting, proposed by Meinunger (2015), is unnecessary for English complex numerals.

Keywords

cardinalscomplex numeralscomplementationadditive complex numerals
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , December 2022 , pp. 723 - 749
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Copyright
Copyright © The Authors, 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We are truly grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions, which have helped us greatly in improving the article. However, we are solely responsible for any remaining errors. C.-S. He is grateful for grant no. 16YBA082 awarded by Hunan Provincial Social Sciences Fund. O.-S. Her gratefully acknowledges the grants awarded by Taiwan's Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST): 108-2410-H-029-062-MY3 and109-2811-H-004-522.

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