The miscellaneous book under review is a collection of papers dealing with the category of number in different languages and under different perspectives. After a very short preface by the editor, the book is composed of five different chapters, all of which are based on presentations given at a pre-conference workshop on ‘number categories’ for the 4th Diversity Linguistics Conference on 3 June 2021, in Bremen, Germany. The chapters do not follow any particular thematic order but analyze some phenomena related to (nominal) number.
Chapter 1, ‘The tonal marking number on nominals in the Wagi dialect of Beria’, by Katharina Gayler, Elsadig Omda Ibrahim and Isabel Compes, investigates number marking through tonal changes on nominals and noun phrases in the only surviving Eastern Saharan language Beria, spoken between Chad and Sudan. More specifically, the chapter focuses on Wagi (undocumented so far), one of the four different varieties of Beria. After presenting some phonological and morphosyntactic properties, the authors point out that Wagi shows three tones that can be combined, resulting in at least six different combinations (but probably more), and these allow phonemic distinctions both at the lexical and the morphological (number on nouns and verbs) levels. So, Wagi displays seven different nominal classes (where ‘nominals’ include nouns, property concepts, possessive pronouns and specifiers – basically demonstratives and anaphoric markers) according to which tonal contour they present in the singular forms and in the plural forms. However, on the one hand, even though they are all treated as nominals, only nouns display all the classes while adjectives inflect for only four of them and possessive pronouns only for two. On the other hand, specifiers are nominals as well but cannot be subsumed under the seven classes from an inflectional point of view since they have a middle tone for the singular and a low-high tone for the plural, a pattern not attested for nouns. In the NP, the number (tonal) distinction is marked just once on the last element of the phrase (the modifier, as Beria is a head-initial language or the head itself if no modifier is present), and thus, the NP takes the inflectional strategy of the nominal class of the modifier (‘modifier pattern’) and not the head nominal pattern. This chapter provides an in-depth preliminary description of the number system in a highly under-documented variety of Beria, which is of particular interest both from a micro-typological and descriptive perspective for Saharan languages but also for the general typology of number given the several peculiar characteristics of Wagi that are not commonly found cross-linguistically. An additional merit of this chapter is also the fact that the authors explain in detail all the methods adopted and the methodological issues they had to face during the analysis.
Deborah Arbes’s chapter, ‘Number inflection of English loanwords in Welsh’, investigates English loanwords in Welsh according to the morphological strategy they employ for plural marking (called multiplex, vs. uniplex, following the terminological proposal by Haspelmath & Karjus Reference Haspelmath and Karjus2017). In addition, the contribution compares these forms to possible cases of codeswitching rather than loanwords (called codeswitches: English words with English plural ending - s without any kind of adaptation; while loanwords usually display soft mutation, initial modification of the first consonant, typical of Welsh plural forms). The author investigates the Siarad corpus of Welsh, which contains 69 naturalistic conversations of bilingual speakers for a total of 40 hours of recordings (circa 450,000 words) from 151 different speakers. After having provided some preliminaries on historical facts concerning Welsh-English contact and the extant literature on the topic, also in this chapter, the author explains in a very detailed fashion all the methods adopted and the choices made, which is a very important aspect of corpus-based research. This paper presents an interesting description, which is mainly a quantitative (in the sense of frequency) account of English loanwords/codeswitches in Welsh rather than an actual analysis, and this makes it relevant mainly from a Celtic perspective.
Chapter 3 has a similar focus to Chapter 2. ‘Two morphologies, two stress systems, shaken, not stirred. Number marking on Russian borrowings in Kamas’, by Alexandre Arkhipov, investigates strategies of adaptation of Russian loanwords in the Kamas language, specifically looking at plural marking strategies. Kamas is an extinct Samoyedic language from the Uralic family, which was (poorly) documented during the eighteenth–twentieth centuries and recorded in the twentieth century. It became then extinct in 1989 after the last speaker’s death. The author first introduces some preliminaries on Kamas and Russian phonology, morphology and prosody. Kamas shows two plural markers (an older and a newer) which are not obligatorily marked: with numerals, the singular is employed (as in other Uralic languages), but also the plural started being used in this context in the Kamas corpus. The author also adds some information about the Russian variety spoken by Klavdiya Plotnikova, the last known speaker of Kamas (i.e. the Northern dialects and Standard Russian). Arkhipov then analyzes thoroughly and in detail all the plural marking strategies employed in the Kamas corpus for borrowed Russian words, categorizing them as one of the three main strategies (some of which can be mixed up into sub-types for a total of six different strategies) mixing both Kamas and Russian structural properties. The chapter is well-written, and it provides a detailed description that can be useful for experts of Uralic linguistics, contact linguists and typologists, too.
Chapter 4, ‘On co-plurals. Cross-linguistic evidence of competing pluralization strategies in the domain of nouns’, by Thomas Stolz, is probably the most theoretical one (in the sense of not-only-descriptive) within the edited book. It focuses on an already-known phenomenon in the literature (e.g. Acquaviva Reference Acquaviva2008 and Thornton Reference Thornton2010), labeled co-plurals (COPLs) by Stolz himself, providing a first cross-linguistic account. Stolz defines COPLs as follows: ‘[t]wo expressions X and Y are copls of each other if they realize the feature plurality for the same noun’ (108). COPLs are generally traced back to two types of phenomena: overdifferentiation (when the two forms display some functional differences) or overabundance (when the two forms are in free variation). Stolz analyzes some cases from different languages (quite different typologically) in which he found COPLs and classifies them into two types, meaningless COPLs and meaningful COPLs, roughly corresponding, respectively, to overabundance and overdifferentiation. He finds that we cannot actually consider COPLs to be cases of overdifferentiation because they tend more frequently to be in free variation with each other according to variables that have mainly to do with sociolinguistic factors (mainly diaphasic and diastratic axes), language change and language contact situations. Despite the impressive comparative and language-specific analysis by Stolz, much more detailed corpus-based analyses of typologically diverse languages are in order to better understand such an interesting phenomenon.
Finally, Chapter 5, ‘Towards a typology of singulatives. Definition and overview of markers’, by Silva Nurmio, provides a first typological account of singulatives in the languages of the world. The data presented in the paper are based on a database of singulatives edited by the author together with Rahel T. Dires and Matilda Carbo, which is about to be published. However, despite the premises and the intended aims, the paper mainly discusses definitional and theoretical issues on singulatives rather than properly presenting their functional and formal characteristics (except for the most frequent marking strategies across languages). This choice, however, is completely understandable mainly because of the lack of general agreement in the literature and the several different terms under which singulatives can be subsumed. The paper is well-written and focuses on issues that are relevant for number studies but also pose difficulties both on definitional and terminological grounds. The merit of this chapter is the focus on a too-long, under-described, but still very important, phenomenon and the proposal of the very first cross-linguistic description of such a phenomenon.
The overall edited book is for sure a great resource for linguists interested in phenomena related to number across different languages, and this makes it also much welcomed in the typological literature. Once again, the chapters show how number is ‘the most underestimated of the grammatical categories. It is deceptively simple and is much more interesting and varied than most linguists realize’ as Corbett (Reference Corbett2000: 1) put it almost 25 years ago. The relevance of this book (like some others in the last two decades, after Corbett’s classic monograph) is exactly to focus on an ‘underestimated’ phenomenon, a suggestion that still needs to be truly fulfilled by the linguistic-typological community, which often limits the conceptualization of number as a mere singular-plural opposition. So, Arbes’s edited volume helps us describe and understand many aspects and issues of number systems we need to investigate in order to rightly account for this and related phenomena. The authors of the chapters show from different perspectives how number systems and values can vary across languages and how approaching them from a typologically oriented viewpoint can help in better understanding language-internal and cross-linguistic variety, too. The diverse range of topics discussed in the book represents one of its main merits, especially if we consider that many of them are generally scarcely discussed in the literature (such as contact situations but also less-described phenomena like COPLs and singulatives). The only shortcoming of the book that deserves to be mentioned is the lack of a structured organization of the topics discussed in the chapters. Indeed, the edited volume does not present a specific thread but simply collects different contributions which discuss grammatical number and related issues, and this can represent a possible inconvenience for the reader. At the same time, I fully understand how it is not always simple to integrate papers dealing with such a broad range of topics under a unique and consistent thematic order, and this becomes even clearer if we consider that this volume is the outcome of a workshop from which only half of the contributions ended up in the volume itself. A publication such as Arbes’s edited book allows us to advance our knowledge on the linguistic diversity and complexities of number systems cross-linguistically, from which linguists from different perspectives and frameworks can greatly benefit.
