Quantifiers with Collective Meaning in Typological Perspective

This study represents a typological investigation of numerals with collective meaning like English both or all three. The comparative concept used here is based on semantics. Under numerals with collective meaning we understand such cases when the quantified group encode the choice of N objects from the set N. Based on data from 106 languages from all over the world this study reveals three possible strategies of coding collective meaning with numerals: (1) adding universal quantifiers to numerals – fr. tous les trois ‘all three’, (2) suppletive forms distinct from numerals – russ. oba ‘both’ vs. dva ‘two’, (3) markers that do not encode universal quantification outside the combination with numerals – ch. ik ɕɨn=da [two person=ADD] ‘both people’. The study discusses in detail the distribution of these strategies, as well as adjacent functions of markers encoding collective meaning.