Objective of the Book

The objective of this book is to develop a deeper understanding of the form and interpretation of number. Using insights from Generative syntax and Distributed Morphology, we develop a theory of distributed number, arguing that number can be associated with several functional heads and that these projections exist depending on the features they specify.

Key Claims

In doing so, we make a strong claim for a close mapping between the syntactic structure and the semantics in the noun phrase, since each node corresponds to a different interpretation of number.

Accessibility and Scope

Despite some technical implementations, the book is accessible to linguists working outside any particular syntax-semantic framework, since we propose generalizations that are applicable in many, if not all, models of grammar.

Languages Covered

The book focuses on Arabic, but also discusses a number of languages including English, French, Ojibwe, Blackfoot, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Turkish, Persian, and Western Armenian.