Cardinals

de Tania Ionin, Ora Matushansky

"This book provides a semantic and syntactic analysis of nominal expressions containing complex cardinals (e.g., two hundred and thirty-five books), and shows that this analysis accounts for the internal composition of cardinal-containing expressions cross-linguistically, as well as a range of related phenomena. While there is much prior linguistic literature on numerals, this literature has not considered the internal composition of complex cardinals: the tacit assumption has been that any syntactic or semantic account that captures the behavior of a simplex cardinal such as five automatically transfers to a complex cardinal such as five hundred or five thousand and forty-six. We show that this assumption is unwarranted, and propose a compositional semantic analysis of complex cardinals. This book considers a wide range of issues in the syntax and semantics of cardinals, investigates a wide variety of languages which use different syntactic structures for complex cardinals, and examines related phenomena, including modified numerals, measure nouns, and fractions. The ultimate objective of this work is to show that complex cardinals are not an extra-linguistic phenomenon (as has often been assumed), but can tell us as much about syntactic structure and semantic composition as other linguistic expressions"--