Volume 10, Issue 2

Spoken languages employ various strategies to mark the plural of nouns, the most important ones being affixation, reduplication, and zero marking; within one language, different strategies and/or different morphological markers may be used, depending on lexical, phonological, or morphological properties of the base noun. In this article we present the first cross-modal typological study of noun pluralization. A comparison of the patterns found in sign languages, in particular German Sign Language (DGS), to those described for spoken languages will show that DGS patterns with spoken languages in that (i) different plural marking strategies are available, (ii) within one strategy (reduplication) there are different types of realization, and (iii) the choice of strategy and of type crucially depend on phonological properties of the base noun, in particular, on the noun's location and movement features. The description of basic plural patterns is supplemented by a typological sketch of the use of classifiers in plural constructions and by an investigation of how and where plural is realized within the noun phrase.

It is generally assumed that all nouns belong to a gender in gender languages and that this constitutes a fundamental difference between gender systems and systems of noun classifiers. An analysis of gender and agreement in the Cameroonian Bantu language Eton challenges this assumption. Gender assignment cannot be predicted on semantic grounds in Eton, except for proper names and deictic kinship terms. Although these nouns trigger the same agreement pattern as nouns of gender 1, their behaviour differs too much from the other nouns for them to be analysed as gender 1 words. It is argued that they form the core of a set of genderless nouns. The agreement pattern they trigger is a multifunctional one: it marks agreement with gender 1 words and with genderless words. It will be shown that multifunctionality is a typical characteristic of agreement patterns in Bantu.

Intensifiers such as himself/herself in English, ipse/ipsa in Latin, stesso/stessa in Italian, sam/samá in Russian, or selbst in German are most easily identifiable in terms of their prosodic and semantic properties. They are invariably in focus and therefore typically stressed, thus evoking specific types of alternative values. Based on a detailed discussion of the distribution and meaning of intensifiers in English, this article describes the major patterns of variation observable in the form of intensifiers across languages. Five types of intensifiers are distinguished on the basis of morpho-syntactic properties like inflection and agreement, and a number of implications and correlations between formal and distributional parameters of variation are pointed out.

Frederick J. Newmeyer, Possible and Probable Languages: A Generative Perspective on Linguistic Typology . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, x + 278 pages, ISBN 0-19-927433-9, £ 60 (hardback), ISBN 0-19-927434-7, £ 22.99 (paperback).