Grammatical typology and frequency analysis: number availability and number use

• Main Authors: Dunstan Brown, Greville G. Corbett, Sebastian Fedden, Andrew Hippisley, Paul Marriott
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Polish Academy of Sciences 2013-12-01
• Series: Journal of Language Modelling
• Subjects: animacy hierarchy; frequency; number; Russian
• Online Access: https://jlm.ipipan.waw.pl/index.php/JLM/article/view/69

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 account for an item's behaviour being different than that solely expected from its animacy position.