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Numeral differential constructions in Arabic

Paper · 2020 · Peter Hallman

Summary

Hallman examines a puzzle in comparatives that contain numerals, for instance an English sentence in which three combines with shells yet tells us by how much Mary's shell count exceeded Joan's. On the surface the numeral belongs to the noun, yet it actually names the size of the gap between two quantities. The classic analysis (Bresnan 1973) solves this by making the numeral a modifier of the comparative morpheme in the underlying structure.

The paper draws on judgments from five Damascus speakers of Syrian Arabic. It argues that in Arabic the numeral genuinely modifies the plural noun, since the usual morphological selection between numeral and noun still holds. The comparative phrase (aktar min + DP) is adjoined to VP.

To reconcile this structure with the meaning, Hallman combines two existing tools:

  • numerals treated as degree quantifiers that can scope outside their noun phrase (Kennedy & Stanley 2009; Kennedy 2013, 2015);
  • late insertion of the comparative DegP between a raised quantifier and its abstraction index, borrowed from Heim's movement treatment of superlatives.

The surprising reading therefore follows from current semantic machinery. Whether English, French and Arabic can share one account is left open.

Key points

  • The data are native-speaker judgments from five Syrian Arabic consultants from Damascus, gathered in Austrian Science Fund (FWF) project P30409.
  • Arabic comparative morphology works as follows:
    • Adjectives use the template aC1C2aC3 (e.g., aṭwal 'taller' from ṭawīl 'tall').
    • The phrasal standard is introduced by min 'than'.
    • aktar 'more' is built on ktīr 'much/many', and its antonym aʔall 'less' on ʔalīl 'little'.
    • The clausal comparative is marked separately by mimma.
  • The comparative phrase can sit at the right clause edge, far from its scalar associate. However, the dependency cannot reach inside a DP, so an adjective within the object DP cannot serve as the associate.
  • A measure-phrase differential cannot precede an Arabic comparative adjective. Instead it follows the comparative phrase inside a b- 'by' PP, e.g., 'taller than Muen by three centimeters'.
  • Generating DegP inside the plural NP would wrongly make the standard (Nabil) a quantity of shells. DegP must therefore be merged high, where it picks up the numeral's trace. The relation to Bhatt & Pancheva's (2004) late-merger account of English remains unresolved.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. A word can attach syntactically to one head (numeral → noun) while semantically filling a slot of another (the comparative's differential), so tree position alone does not fix interpretation.
  • I2. The search for a comparative's scalar associate can range over the clause but is blocked by noun-phrase boundaries, giving a crisp, explainable locality rule.
  • I3. The fewer variant ("five laps fewer than Joan") shows that the numeral does not assert an absolute count, which serves as a minimal-pair diagnostic.
  • I4. A bare standard like "than Nabil" borrows its predicate from the constituent the comparative phrase attaches to, and this yields several readings (Nabil as rival giver or as alternative recipient).
  • I5. Treating numerals as degree quantifiers with their own scope separates the quantity from the noun phrase that hosts it.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): when mapping UD nummod in "three more shells than X" to frames, route the number to a difference slot of the comparison frame rather than to the absolute count of shells.
  • I2 (tree): implement associate-finding as an upward walk over the UD tree that may land on a plural object NP but never descends into its amod dependents, logging the path as the explanation.
  • I3 (learn): add more/fewer minimal pairs as negative controls in evaluation, checking that the system never infers "Mary swam five laps" from the fewer sentence.
  • I4 (answer): in maths word problems, reconstruct the elided predicate from the attachment site and enumerate the competing readings before computing, instead of guessing one silently.
  • I5 (world): store counts as degrees on a predicate (shells-found(x, d)) so that differentials between two entities' holdings can be computed and explained directly.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🔬Austrian Research Institute for Artificial IntelligenceVienna · Austria2 works · 1 citation

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPsychology · 798 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 260 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semitic languages · 1,484 worksMorphology · 277 works

Cite

Cite as Peter Hallman. 2020. Numeral differential constructions in Arabic. Semantics and Pragmatics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.13.17

@article{hallman2020numeral,
  title = {{Numeral differential constructions in Arabic}},
  author = {Peter Hallman},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.13.17},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.13.17}
}

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