Beyond cardinals and ordinals: A Constructionist account of other numeral constructions in Akan

Abstract

A numeral is defined as “a word or phrase expressing a number”, where number is defined as “a mathematical abstraction” (Hurford, 2001, p. 10756). Thus, a numeral is a linguistic representation of a number. This is how we understand that the two numerals ‘fifteen hundred’ and ‘one thousand five hundred’ express the same number, “1500”. Numerals have been studied from many different perspectives across languages. However, most studies focus on cardinal numerals in attributive constructions (cf. Greenberg, 1978; Heine, 1997; Stampe, 1976; von Mengden, 2010). Others too have paid considerable attention to ordinal numerals (Stampe, 1976; Stolz & Veselinova, 2011; Stump, 2010), and, indeed, cardinal and ordinal numerals have very interesting linguistic properties. However, the set of numerical expressions in any language is more than the set used to express the cardinality of sets or the ordinality of the items in the set. Other classes of numerals like fraction, frequentatives, distributives and multiplicatives abound and have been noted to present very interesting linguistic properties (cf., inter alia, Gil, 2013).This talk is a constructionist account of non-cardinal and non-ordinal numerals in Akan. I show that the formal structure of the various classes of numerals is quite regular because they inherit their structure from already existing syntactic and morphological constructions in the language, including coordinate constructions, compounding and reduplication. In the proposed constructionist account, I make the point that the properties of the various classes of numerals can be captured in schemas which abstract over the general as well as idiosyncratic properties of the various classes. I posit constructional idioms, in which various aspects of the numerals which may be regarded as constructional properties are prespecified in the schemas and inherited by the instantiating constructions.