Grammatical Number

A Grammatical Number is Grammatical Category of Nouns, Pronouns, and Noun Phrases that expresses a count distinctions.

• Example(s)
  • "one", "two", or "three or more";
  • Dual Number (DU),
  • Trial Number,
  • Quadral Number,
  • Paucal Number.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • Grammatical Gender,
  • Real Number,
  • Natural Number,
  • Cardinal Number.
• See: Singular Noun, Plural Noun, Adjective, Natural Language Processing, Linguistics, Cognitive Psychology.

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References

2015

• (Riordan et al., 2015) ⇒ Riordan, B., Dye, M., & Jones, M. N. (2015). "Grammatical number processing and anticipatory eye movements are not tightly coordinated in English spoken language comprehension". Frontiers in psychology, 6, 590.
  • ABSTRACT: Recent studies of eye movements in world-situated language comprehension have demonstrated that rapid processing of morphosyntactic information – e.g., grammatical gender and number marking – can produce anticipatory eye movements to referents in the visual scene. We investigated how type of morphosyntactic information and the goals of language users in comprehension affected eye movements, focusing on the processing of grammatical number morphology in English-speaking adults. Participants’ eye movements were recorded as they listened to simple English declarative (There are the lions.) and interrogative (Where are the lions?) sentences. In Experiment 1, no differences were observed in speed to fixate target referents when grammatical number information was informative relative to when it was not. The same result was obtained in a speeded task (Experiment 2) and in a task using mixed sentence types (Experiment 3). We conclude that grammatical number processing in English and eye movements to potential referents are not tightly coordinated. These results suggest limits on the role of predictive eye movements in concurrent linguistic and scene processing. We discuss how these results can inform and constrain predictive approaches to language processing.

2014

• (Sarnecka, 2014) ⇒ Sarnecka, B. W. (2014). "On the relation between grammatical number and cardinal numbers in development." Frontiers in psychology, 5, 1132.
  • ABSTRACT: This mini-review focuses on the question of how the grammatical number system of a child's language may help the child learn the meanings of cardinal number words (e.g., "one" and "two"). Evidence from young children learning English, Russian, Japanese, Mandarin, Slovenian, or Saudi Arabic suggests that trajectories of number-word learning differ for children learning different languages. Children learning English, which distinguishes between singular and plural, seem to learn the meaning of the cardinal number "one" earlier than children learning Japanese or Mandarin, which have very little singular/plural marking. Similarly, children whose languages have a singular/dual/plural system (Slovenian and Saudi Arabic) learn the meaning of "two" earlier than English-speaking children. This relation between grammatical and cardinal number may shed light on how humans acquire cardinal-number concepts. There is an ongoing debate about whether mental symbols for small cardinalities (concepts for "oneness," "twoness," etc.) are innate or learned. Although an effect of grammatical number on number-word learning does not rule out nativist accounts, it seems more consistent with constructivist accounts, which portray the number-learning process as one that requires significant conceptual change.

2009

• (Wikipedia, 2009) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_number
  • In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one" or "more than one"). [1]
  • The count distinctions typically, but not always, correspond to the actual count of the referents of the marked noun or pronoun.
  • The word "number" is also used in linguistics to describe the distinction between certain grammatical aspects that indicate the number of times an event occurs, such as the semelfactive aspect, the iterative aspect, etc. For that use of the term, see "Grammatical aspect".

2008

• (Sarnecka et al., 2008) ⇒ Sarnecka, B. W., Kamenskaya, V. G., Yamana, Y., Ogura, T., & Yudovina, Y. B. (2007). "From grammatical number to exact numbers: Early meanings of ‘one’,‘two’, and ‘three’in English, Russian, and Japanese". Cognitive psychology, 55(2), 136-168.
  • ABSTRACT: This study examined whether singular/plural marking in a language helps children learn the meanings of the words ‘one,’ ‘two,’ and ‘three.’ First, CHILDES data in English, Russian (which marks singular/plural), and Japanese (which does not) were compared for frequency, variability, and contexts of number-word use. Then young children in the USA, Russia, and Japan were tested on Counting and Give-N tasks. More English and Russian learners knew the meaning of each number word than Japanese learners, regardless of whether singular/plural cues appeared in the task itself (e.g., “Give two apples” vs. “Give two”). These results suggest that the learning of “one,” “two” and “three” is supported by the conceptual framework of grammatical number, rather than that of integers.

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