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Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication
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Functional Unit Classifiers In (Non)-Classifier Russian, Keren Khrizman
Functional Unit Classifiers In (Non)-Classifier Russian, Keren Khrizman
Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication
It has often been argued that functional individuating classifiers and plural count nouns ought to be in complementary distribution (e.g. Borer 2005, Chierchia 2010). This apparently works neatly for Chinese and English. Russian, however, is an interesting case. On the one hand it has count nouns which can be directly modified by numerals. On the other hand it has three classifiers, štuka ‘item’, čelovek ‘person’ and golova ‘head’, which optionally occur in numeral constructions with plural nouns and look very much like functional individuating classifiers (cf. Sussex 1976, Yadroff 1999). I show that a closer look at the data reveals …