Paucal number, for a few (as opposed to many) instances of the referent (e.g. in Hopi, Warlpiri, Lower Sepik-Ramu languages, some Oceanic languages including Fijian,. Motuna,. Serbo-Croatian,. and in Arabic for some nouns). Paucal number has also been documented in some Cushitic languages of Ethiopia, including Baiso, which marks singular, paucal, plural.. When paucal number is used in Arabic, it generally refers to ten or fewer instances.
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The Lihir language is an Austronesian language spoken in the Lihir island group, in New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea. It is notable for having 5 levels of grammatical number: singular, dual, trial, paucal and plural. It is questionable whether the trial is indeed trial or whether it is paucal, leaving there being a paucal and a greater paucal. Either way, this is the highest number of levels of grammatical number in any language.
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The realization of different grammatical meanings of Number in the noun depends on the syntactic function and case marking. The noun in the dative overtly differentiates 4 grammatical meaning of number: singular, dual, paucal and plural; the noun in the oblique shows singular ~ dual ~ paucal/plural opposition, while the ergative − singular ~ dual/paucal ~ plural, and the noun in absolutive cannot be distinguished according to number.See Evans (2015).
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Of the Indo-European languages, Northern Kurdish or Kurmanji is one of the few known languages with paucal number. In Russian, the genitive singular is also applied to two, three or four items (2, 3, 4 ка́мня – stones, gen. sg.; but 5...20 камне́й – stones, gen. pl.), making it effectively paucal (cf.
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In general, Polynesian languages have three numbers for pronouns and possessives: singular, dual and plural. For example, in Māori: ia (he/she), rāua (they two), rātou (they 3 or more). The words rua (2) and toru (3) are still discernible in endings of the dual and plural pronouns, giving the impression that the plural was originally a trial (threesome) or paucal (a few), and that an original plural has disappeared.Indeed Fijian, a language closely related to Polynesian, has singular, dual, paucal, and plural; and even there we may see the paucal replacing the plural in generations to come, as the paucal currently can be used for a group from 3 up to as many as 10, usually with some family, workgroup or other association.
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Two further uses of these pronominal forms occur - a reflexive pronoun, and a set of interrogative pronouns. The dual and paucal forms are derived from the plural forms by the addition of ko- and tu- respectively. The dual forms are used only to indicate 'two and only two', whilst the plural and paucal forms mean 'two or more' and 'three or more' respectively. First person exclusive excludes the addresse(s).
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The Macedonian denar (; paucal: denari / денари; sign: den, code: MKD) is the currency of North Macedonia. It is subdivided into one hundred deni (), which is no longer in use since 2013.
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39) 387-97. Canberra: and in several other Austronesian languages. While not all of these languages are adequately attested, it turns out that Sursurunga instead has both a "lesser paucal" (labeled "trial", but in fact referring to small groups, with typically three or four members) and a "greater paucal" (misnamed the "quadral", as it has a minimum of four, e.g. a pair of dyadic kin terms)—the distinction is along the lines of "a few" vs.
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The language has four numbers: singular, dual, paucal, and plural. Nouns show all four while pronouns are either singular and non-singular. First-person non-singular shows a distinction in inclusive and exclusive.
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Sursurunga is famous for having a five-way grammatical number distinction. The numbers beside singular, dual, and plural have been called trial and quadral (Hutchisson 1986); however, these numbers, which only occur on pronouns, indicate a minimum of three and four, not exactly three and four the way the dual indicates exactly two.Corbett, Greville G., Number, Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics, P240.8.C67 2000, They are equivalent to "a few" and "several", and Corbett has called them (lesser) paucal and greater paucal.
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Slovene has one more distinction. With its use of dual ('one dog' is en pes, 'two dogs' is dva psa), paucal is only used for counting 3 and 4 (3, 4 psi – dogs, pl.; but 5+ psov – dogs, gen.pl.).
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The Serbian dinar (, ; paucal: dinara / динара; sign: din; code: RSD) is the official currency of Serbia. One dinar is subdivided into 100 para. The dinar was first used in Serbia in medieval times, its earliest use dates back to 1214.
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"several";—and that what Marshallese actually has is a trial and a paucal. None of them has a "quadral"; in at least two cases the field workers who originally suggested they did have a "quadral" were also the first to publish a peer-reviewed article contradicting that suggestion.
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The three numbers that can be marked in verbs are singular, paucal plural, and multiple plural. There are six types of aspect, and any verb can have as many as three and as few as zero aspect markers. The six types are distributive-iterative, continued, interrupted, perfective, imperfective, and habitual.
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In Murrinh-Patha there are four categories which in total make up for 31 pronouns. The categories are: singular, dual, paucal (referring to 3 to 15 individuals) and plural (more than 15). While some of the pronouns stand on their own in the sentence structure, many are embodied in the middle of a verb.
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This section deals with grammatical number of the Welsh language which should not be confused with the numerals of Welsh. Grammatical number deals with how a language deals with singular nouns, plural nouns, dual nouns, paucal nouns, collective nouns, etc. No language has all types of grammatical number and the Welsh grammatical number is discussed below.
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Lengo has five sets of pronominal forms. These are emphatic, subject reference, object, direct possessor, and indirect possessor. These distinguish maximally between four persons (first person inclusive and exclusive, second, and third person), and four numbers (singular, plural, dual, and paucal). There is no grammatical gender distinction, but there is an animacy distinction in the object paradigm.
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Siwai exhibits five genders: masculine, feminine, diminutive, local, and manner. These are marked in the singular forms only since dual and paucal forms are all marked like diminutive and plurals are marked like masculine. These genders coexist with fifty-one semantic types, marked by classifiers. These in turn are combined with numerals, demonstratives, and possessive pronouns.
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In Croatian the euro and cent are called euro and cent (occasionally the word eurocent is used instead of cent to distinguish the euro denomination versus its foreign counterparts). Plural forms are, like in many Slavic languages, somewhat complex. The general plural form of euro is euri, but the paucal or identically written (but not identically pronounced) genitive plural eura is used with all numbers, thus 27 eura. The numbers ending in 1 (e.g. 21 or 101) take the nominative singular, the exception being numbers ending in 11 (e.g. 11 or 111). The examples are: 21 euro, 101 euro, 11 eura, and 111 eura respectively. The general plural form of cent is centi and it is used with most numbers. The numbers ending in 1, except for those ending in 11, take the nominative singular cent, while those ending in 2, 3 and 4 except 12, 13 or 14 take the paucal centa.
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Number marking provides an example of implicational hierarchies in morphology. (5) Number: singular < plural < dual < trial / paucal On the one hand, the hierarchy implies that no language distinguishes a trial unless having a dual, and no language has dual without a plural. On the other hand, the hierarchy provides implications for the morphological marking: if the plural is coded with a certain number of morphemes, then the dual is coded with at least as many morphemes.
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Alawa divides its nouns into two genders (masculine and feminine)Sharpe, M. C. (1972) while Marra has three classes (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and Warndarrang six. All three languages distinguish between singular, dual, and plural, with Warndarrang having an additional "paucal" (three to five) class for human nouns. The use of noun cases in Warndarrang and Marra are nearly identical – Marra condenses the allative and locative cases and adds a pergressive case – though the only cognate across the paradigm is the purposive '. The case marking system of Alawa is apparently not related.
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In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two", or "three or more").. English and other languages present number categories of singular or plural, both of which are cited by using the hash sign (#) or by the numero signs "No." and "Nos." respectively. Some languages also have a dual, trial, and paucal number or other arrangements. The count distinctions typically, but not always, correspond to the actual count of the referents of the marked noun or pronoun. The word "number" is also used in linguistics to describe the distinction between certain grammatical aspects that indicate the number of times an event occurs, such as the semelfactive aspect, the iterative aspect, etc.
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