Plurality in Naxi and its typological implications

Abstract

Plurality in Naxi can be explicitly expressed by suffixation or tone change on common nouns denoting human beings. This paper complements the published literature in providing a detailed description of its morpho-syntax and semantics of plurality. It shows that Naxi belongs to the typologically rare type of language in which the coding of plurality and definiteness is in one morpheme, the other three languages known to date to have this property are Chinese, Khmer and Maori. Evidence for the definiteness property of explicit plurality comes from it being excluded in syntactic environments in which definiteness noun phrases are ruled out. It is argued that the empirical basis of Greenberg’s (1974) generalization regarding the relation between numeral classifiers and compulsory expression of nominal plurality is subject to the interpretation of explicit expression of plurality. If it is taken to embody in a morpheme (or a set of morphemes) specifically for expressing plurality, then Naxi is consistent with Greenberg’s claim that languages with numeral classifiers do not have compulsory expression of plurality on nouns.