Classifiers

Download or read book Classifiers written by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2000-03-30 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Almost all languages have some ways of categorizing nouns. Languages of South-East Asia have classifiers used with numerals, while most Indo-European languages have two or three genders. They can have a similar meaning and one can develop from the other. This book provides a comprehensive and original analysis of noun categorization devices all over the world. It will interest typologists, those working in the fields of morphosyntactic variation and lexical semantics, as well as anthropologists and all other scholars interested in the mechanisms of human cognition.