A corpus-based quantitative study of numeral classifiers in Nepali

Abstract

Nepali is typologically rare in terms of nominal classification systems, as it is one of the few languages of the world having simultaneously two gender systems (human/non-human, masculine/feminine) and one numeral classifier system (distinguishing features such as human, round-shaped objects, and long objects among others). Such a rare co-occurrence of different nominal classification systems is highly relevant for investigating linguistic complexity, as languages generally do not have several systems of the same type fulfilling the same functions. However, no corpus-based quantitative analyses have been conducted on the productive use of nominal classification systems in Nepali. The current paper aims at filling this gap by providing a token-based study from the Nepali National Corpus (∼20 million words). Our preliminary results show that there is in fact little formal overlap between the classifier and the gender systems.