Linguistics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for professional linguists and others with an interest in linguistic research and theory. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Does anyone know how typologically common it is to have number agreement on nouns even when that noun's plurality is implied by numerals?
For instance, in Spanish "two houses" is "dos casas", i.e, the noun "casa" is marked for plural even though we already know there's two of them. Why not "dos casa"?
Are there more languages in which plural marking is always obligatory or more in which plural marking becomes optional with numerals? Is either strategy related to other features?
Pluralising after a number is an arial feature, not necessarily a question of language family. For example, Armenian, Georgian, Persian and Turkish do not mark after a number (or after the word "many/much"), although they are from 3 completely separate language families.
But there are many borderline cases. Some languages never pluralise with morphology anyway. Some languages have a singular, a dual or paucal and a plural. Some languages do not pluralise after a number in some cases. For example, in German, it is correct to say "2 Bier".
Even if we somehow handle the edge cases, the definition of "common" is arbitrary, because there is no objective way to count languages. Does Luxembourgish count? Does it have the same weight as Bengali with hundreds of millions of speakers?
So it probably makes more sense to look at map than at a number or even a list. But we should beware of false precision in answers to questions like this.
The languages put under the Altaic group, generally have optional or non plural with nouns. For example Japanese doesn't have it all, or Turkic languages usage of plural nouns are discouraged and limited to the couple of cases. Sama goes for Ugro-Finnic languages.
