Grammatical Features Inventory: Number

In attempting to understand language, many researchers use features, the elements
into which linguistic units, such as words, can be broken down. Examples of features
are NUMBER (singular, plural, dual, ...), PERSON (1st, 2nd, 3rd), and TENSE (present,
past, ...). Features have proved invaluable for analysis and description, and have a
major role in contemporary linguistics, from the most abstract theorising to the most
applied computational applications. Yet little is firmly established about features:
we have no inventory of which features are found in the world's languages, no agreed
account of how they operate across different components of language, no certainty on
how they interact, and thus no general theory of features. They are used, but are
little discussed and poorly understood. This is a central gap in the conceptual
underpinning of much linguistic investigation.

The Grammatical Features Inventory is an attempt to put the notion of linguistic
'feature' on a sounder empirical and conceptual base. It aims to provide evidence for
the diverse content of features in the world's languages, as well as discuss some of
their formal properties, particularly in morphology (word structure) and syntax
(sentence structure).

'Number' is a grammatical category which encodes quantification over entities or events denoted by nouns or nominal elements. It derives from the ability to perceive something as a token, an instance of a class of referents, and the ability to differentiate between one and more than one (i.e. the 'plurality' of) instances of the referent. Since number can refer to entities or events, it has been suggested that in language we find both nominal number and verbal number, the latter phenomenon also being referred to as 'pluractionality'. However, on the alternative view, pluractionality is regarded as an expression of situaton type (see the entry on 'Aspect'), not number. The present entry will focus on nominal number.

This resource was created for the project 'Grammatical features: A key to
understanding language', funded by the Economic and Social Research Council under
grant number RES-051-27-0122. This support is gratefully acknowledged.