About the project

This website comes from the project Make it count: new advances in understanding grammatical number, funded by the Research Council of Finland (funding decision number 347469). It presents sets of pictures that can be used by linguists eliciting data on grammatical number. While this is the primary purpose to which the instructions are aimed, it is also possible for speakers to fill in the questionnaires by themselves.

 

Grammatical number means values like singular (dog) and plural (dogs) - other values found cross-linguistically are the dual (for two referents), the trial (for three, although this number value is found very marginally) and paucal (denoting a relatively small plurality). Some languages also feature a category of collective nouns. A related linguistic phenomenon is a division into objects (dog, book, car…) and substances (water, sand, mud…) often referred to as the mass/count distinction (books can be counted, water less easily so). 

 

Grammatical number is a central feature of languages, yet there are many open questions, for example:

 

Critical to answering these questions is to get data on number from more languages, especially less documented and endangered ones, in order to diversify our understanding of how number works. The methodology presented here aims to give linguists a tool to collect such data.

 

The methodology is informed by two key things.

 

  1. Different noun referents (what the noun refers to, e.g., a dog) may behave differently as regards number. We have included referents from along the animacy hierarchy (human > animate (non-human) > inanimate) and also distinctions such as domestic vs. wild animals or insects, or edible vs. inedible substances (water vs. glass)
  2. Number is not only about singular vs. plural, even though this is a common distinction in many languages. 

 

The pictures have been drawn by two artists. BEE, COW, HAND, LION, LEAF and WATER were drawn by Maria Vilja and the rest by Matilda Carbo who is a member of the project [link].

 

The website was created by Mikhail Zolotilin and Aleksei Zolotilin.

 

The website should be referred to as:
ADD

 

All pictures on this website are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).