Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Grammatical Typology And Frequency Analysis: Number Availability And Number Use, Dunstan Brown, Greville G. Corbett, Sebastian Fedden, Andrew R. Hippisley, Paul Marriott

Linguistics Faculty Publications

The Smith-Stark hierarchy, a version of the Animacy Hierarchy, offers a typology of the cross-linguistic availability of number. The hierarchy predicts that the availability of number is not arbitrary. For any language, if the expression of plural is available to a noun, it is available to any noun of a semantic category further to the left of the hierarchy. In this article we move one step further by showing that the structure of the hierarchy can be observed in a statistical model of number use in Russian. We also investigate three co-variates: plural preference, pluralia tantum and irregularity effects; these …