Numerals and the homogeneity of description and explanation

Abstract

A dispute over the generative grammar of numerals raises wider issues: (1) Detailed analytical work is as essential to progress in linguistics as broader programmatic proposals. Numerals differ in some respects from the rest of language. Facts concerning such differences are inaccessible to broad programmatic studies because of their concentration on unifying principles and their imposition of a homogeneous character, at a given level, on descriptions of different constructions. (2) On another dimension, the concentration on unifying principles (manifested in normal generative grammar by the quest for a single description capturing all ‘significant generalizations’) is often taken to presuppose homogeneity of explanation for all synchronic linguistic facts. But various aspects of a single description may have different types of explanation (e.g. psychological, historical). Recent generative descriptive work on numerals happens to reveal this problem acutely.