Description of the linguistic expressions of fractions

Rémi Anicotte (1)

1 CRLAO - Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l'Asie Orientale

This paper proposes a typology of fractional numbers. A few fractional numbers can be expressed by suppletive (non-systematic) forms, whereas analytical (systematic) linguistic patterns of formation produce “bi-dimensional” numerical forms which refer to both the numerator and the denominator (double argument), or “mono-dimensional” forms which refer to only one of these numbers (single argument). Moreover, a fraction in a partitive expression can be an indivisible semantic unit or may, on the contrary, have a noun or a measure word inserted between its constituents.

Keywords: Partitive expressions; Numerals; Fractions; Divisible semantic units; Language planning; Grammatical number

Domains: Linguistics; History, Philosophy and Sociology of Sciences

Rémi Anicotte. Description of the linguistic expressions of fractions. Language Sciences, In press, ⟨10.1016/j.langsci.2022.101483⟩. ⟨hal-03428096v3⟩