Nominal plurality in Shughni: A corpora and experimental study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30842/30346800.2026.2.2.5Keywords:
number marking, nominal plurality, corpus study, experiment, ShughniAbstract
The paper is devoted to the variable number marking in Shughni nouns and reports the results of corpus and experimental studies. In some languages, including Shughni, the marking of plural nouns is not compulsory. Many factors such as animacy, referentiality, morphological and semantic properties, or syntactic position may determine the presence or absence of number marking.
The corpus study investigates the typological factors including referentiality, animacy, and presence of quantifiers. 428 corpus entries of nouns with plural meaning balanced in terms of major semantic groups were examined. Chi-squared tests were applied to confirm that referentiality and presence of quantifiers were significant factors for number marking in the sample, while the factor of animacy was not significant. Nouns denoting definite entities as well as noun phrases including quantifiers are more likely to receive number marking.
The naming task experiment was conducted to determine whether some lexically specified properties affect number marking in addition to more general tendencies discovered using corpus data. The materials included 35 picture stimuli representing plural objects of various semantic groups. Data obtained from a demographically heterogenous (with respect to gender, age group, and education level) 19 native Shughni speakers were analyzed. The hierarchy of stimuli according to the frequency of number marking was modeled using the Guttman scale. The results of the naming task experiment showed that in addition to the corpus tendencies, some extralinguistic properties, such as animacy or belonging to a pair or a set of identical distinct objects, trigger number marking more often.
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