Number as a categorizing parameter in Southern Bantu: An exploration in cognitive grammar

Abstract

Standard views of grammatical number have been based on the countability of items in the noun lexicon. Traditional descriptions of the Southern Bantu noun class system subsume these countability properties of nouns as the basis for the categorization of nouns into various classes. In this article I take issue with the standard interpretation of grammatical number, arguing instead that grammatical number is cognitively construed as the spatial distribution of quantities. As such, grammatical number functions as a categorizing parameter in conjunction with other cognitive parameters in the Southern Bantu noun class system.