A Third Number: Discussing Duals in Lithuanian Language
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A Thir d Number: Discussing Duals in Lithuanian Language
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A Third Number: Discussing Duals in Lithuanian Language
Jone Bruno,
Trinity College Dublin
1. Introduction
Every culture understands the world in different ways and it is safe to say that one of the
ways to transfer such information is through language. The existence of syntactic, phonetic
and morphological patters that exist through different languages has been widely discussed
and through such discussions, the different perspectives of the existent world were revealed.
This paper is set to reveal the complex understanding of the Lithuanian culture through an
extraordinary feature of dual number, or as
Ambrazas (2006)
states the residue of it.
What is the category of number and what are duals? What type of number system
does Lithuanian language has? Are duals considered a part of the grammatical class? If not,
what are the functions of duals? These are just some of the questions that this paper
addresses. Moreover, an empirical research was completed in order to establish the frequency
of the dual usage, to observe which duals are preferred by the speakers and which are less
used.
2. Framework, Methodology and Data
This research adapts quantitative and qualitative methodology. The data is extracted from
Corpus of Lithuanian Language (CLL) which was compiled by the Vytatutas Magnus
University, Kaunas, Lithuania. It is accessible online through vdu.lt1. It is a database of
journal articles, administrative literature, fiction, non-fiction and a small amount of spoken
language. This corpus is not annotated and consists of approximately 102 million tokens and
is the biggest corpus of the Lithuanian language. Nevertheless, the tools of this corpus are not
elaborate. Fihure 1 indicates the distribution of literature that this corpus is composed of.
Words that carry dual number were chosen and were searched using the tools of the
corpus. The examples were extracted and compared. Also the frequency of the word
occurrence was noted and the numbers compared. The next section briefly overviews the
class of number in order to fully understand the phenomenon.
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1 http://tekstynas.vdu.lt/tekstynas/
The C?orpus o?f M?odern L?ithuania?n
3. The Category of Number
This chapter discusses the grammatical category of number.
Miller (1993
:12-13) points out
that numerating items is an abstract and arbitrary depending on the cultural understanding
and the enumerating system, however, it occurs in all of the languages unexceptionally. It
seems to be apparent that the category of number is simple, nevertheless, Corbett (2012:7)
marks that number is a morpho-syntactic category and is not as clear as it appears. This
means that languages mark it differently and there are various systems of number. To clarify,
the category of number does not discuss the numerals like 1, 2, and 3; it rather takes scope
over the ways that language encodes the opposition of one, two, three or more referents in the
clause. As it is further outlines, this class is multi-layered and more complex.
Pavey (2010:191) explains that is most languages there are distinction between
singular and plural, some languages have dual in addition to traditional binary opposition and
only a few have trial number which refers to the three referents. It is clear that the class of
number encodes the perception of what the culture groups together as an entity: single
person/ item, two people/ items, three as a group marking the importance of all, or
distinguishes just the opposition between ?one? and ?more than one?, or all of the above. Bhat
(2004:91) states that the agreement of number is more complex than it seems in the cases of
languages which have specific differentiation of ?inclusive? and ?exclusive? numbers,
nevertheless, in languages with the ?singular? and ?plural? distinction, the agreement always
corresponds between the noun or the pronoun and the entity it refers to. It needs to be
clarified that this paper acknowledges the existence of number systems that enumerate the
events in the predication. However, this paper is set out to analyses only the nominal
constructions.
There are several levels that the class of number takes scope over. Pavey (2010:191)
states that grammatical number on the noun phrase is a core level operator and therefore
modifies the entire meaning of the phrase. This means the agreement in number has to be
ITB ?Journal ?May ?2015 ? ? ?
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carried not only by the noun or pronoun, but also by the entire phrase constituents.
Labutis
(2002
:30) states that all adjectival words in Lithuanian do not carry an inherent number,
however, when used in a phrase it has to agree with the nominal of the phrase in gender and
number and most often in case. Number, also is reflect (...truncated)