Numeral classifiers and number marking in Indo-Iranian

Abstract

This paper investigates the origins of sortal numeral classifiers in the Indo-Iranian languages. While these are often assumed to result from contact with non-Indo-European languages, an alternative possibility is that classifiers developed as a response to the rise of optional plural marking. This alternative is in line with the so-called Greenberg-Sanches-Slobin (henceforth GSS) generalization. The GSS generalization holds that the presence of sortal numeral classifiers across languages is negatively correlated with obligatory plural marking on nouns. We assess the extent to which Indo-Iranian classifier development is influenced by loosening of restrictions on plural marking using a sample of 65 languages and a Bayesian phylogenetic model, inferring posterior distributions over evolutionary transition rates between typological states and using these rates to reconstruct the history of classifiers and number marking throughout Indo-Iranian, constrained by historically attested states. We find broad support for a diachronically oriented construal of the GSS generalization, but find no evidence for a strong bias against the synchronic co-occurrence of classifiers and obligatory plural marking. Inspection of the most likely diachronic trajectories in individual lineages in the tree shows a stronger effect of the GSS among Iranian languages than Indo-Aryan languages. Taken as a whole, these findings suggest that the association of classifiers and optional number marking in Indo-Iranian is neither solely the effect of universal mechanisms nor of the contingency of local contact histories.

Reconstructing the evolution of Indo-European grammar

“…The issue of how to treat the root prior is not widely discussed in phylogenetic linguistics (many studies do not mention the issue at all), with some exceptions (Maurits & Griffiths 2014). In our main analyses, we follow other work (Cathcart et al 2018, Blasi et al 2019, Cathcart et al 2020 in employing the stationary probability as the root prior. At the same time, because use of the stationary probability may bias our reconstructions, we run our models under two additional inference regimes, one using a uniform (i.e.…”

“…These rates can be used to reconstruct the probability of a given value at internal nodes of the tree, including the root (i.e. the node ancestral to all others in the tree), as well as infer locations on branches of the tree where change is likely to have taken place (Maurits & Griffiths 2014, Dunn et al 2017, Widmer et al 2017, Blasi et al 2019, Cathcart et al 2020.…”

Formal Syntax and Deep History

“…Indeed, after close consideration of the parameter values, the 0s induced by the lack of value "+" for FGP is the main source of peculiar similarity between Mandarin-Cantonese and Korean-Japanese. Beyond this, the parameters in which the four languages share a value in contrast to all the other languages are only two: p27, FGE, about the necessity of a classifier between a numeral and a head noun (itself a property very frequent in languages without a positive value at FGN: see Cathcart et al, 2020), and p61, LKP, about the presence of a special morpheme linking the noun with essentially any of its arguments. place a monophyletic constraint on the set of Uralic languages in the BEAST phylogeny, the stable result is that Uralic is clustered with the Altaic-Yukaghir node.…”

The Evolutionary Dynamics of Negative Existentials in Indo-European

“…The phylogenetic tree set is given, we are not inferring phylogenies, but rather using them to do quantitative diachronic typology: testing an influential hypothesis using phylogenetic methods. Phylogenetic comparative models have been used to estimate what typological strategy the ancestors of sampled languages must have had (Maurits and Griffiths 2014), and the rates of evolutionary change (Cathcart et al, 2020). We will focus on which transition parameters are most relevant for explaining the distribution of strategies attested in our sample (see also Dunn et al, 2017).…”