The book embeds a description and an analysis of the Old English
numeral system into a broader, cross-linguistic discussion. It
provides a theoretical framework for the study of numerals and
numeral systems of natural languages, bridging the gap between
recent findings in the cognitive sciences on numeracy and the known
typological generalisations on cardinal numerals. The Old English
numeral system shows a number of peculiarities not found in the
present-day languages of Europe. Its detailed description is
therefore an ideal locus for studying the features of linguistic
number expressions in terms of their morpho-syntactic properties
and of the structure of numeral systems. The approach is innovative
in that it combines a detailed analysis of the numeral system with
the analysis of the grammatical properties of cardinal numerals.
For the description of Old English, the study focuses on aspects of
information structure and of referent identification in
quantificational constructions. This leads to a novel perspective
on the language-internal variation in the agreement patterns
between numerals and quantified nouns, allowing the author to test
and refine some long standing tenets in the study of numerals and
to offer alternative explanations. Rather than seeing numerals as a
hybrid word class, the author argues that this variation in the
morpho-syntactic behaviour follows identifiable patterns specific
to the word class numeral. He accounts for these patterns by
positing different, cross-linguistically uniform stages in the
emergence of numeral systems, as well as varying degrees of
discreteness of the quantified noun. Moreover, the author
demonstrates that the constraints determining this variation in Old
English have obvious parallels across languages.
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