For a number of reasons, I have had cause to go back to—and reformat—a paper on Irish numeral phrases that I presented long ago (in 1995) at a Canadian Linguistics Association Meeting. The paper was to have appeared in the Proceedings, but I have not been able to find any existent copies or links to such. If anyone knows of a link where this publication can be found, I'll take this down; otherwise, it's available here.
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Arcane as the topic may seem, the syntax of numeral phrases is, I think, a revealing phenomenon, showing the possible limits of conventional phrase-structure syntax to handle discontinuous dependencies and spreading agreement. It also offers a good treatment of classifier phrases in East Asian languages (developing ideas originally due to Elisabeth Löbel 1990). It was written at a time when I still believed that a purely syntactic solution was the best solution to every problem: I'm less sure now, but it's not a bad technical attempt.
Click to access pdf file
Arcane as the topic may seem, the syntax of numeral phrases is, I think, a revealing phenomenon, showing the possible limits of conventional phrase-structure syntax to handle discontinuous dependencies and spreading agreement. It also offers a good treatment of classifier phrases in East Asian languages (developing ideas originally due to Elisabeth Löbel 1990). It was written at a time when I still believed that a purely syntactic solution was the best solution to every problem: I'm less sure now, but it's not a bad technical attempt.
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