Nominal Number in Meso-Melanesian

This paper, presented in the workshop on number marking, presents details of nominal and pronominal number marking in the Meso-Melanesian group of Austronesian languages. Languages of this group display a range of morphosyntactic and morphosemantic phenomena relating to number that require accounting for by any theory of grammar. These include hierarchies of number categories; the interaction of hierarchies of animacy with number; the role of number markers as syntactic heads; inversion in number marking; and patterns of indexing target for number in possessive constructions. This paper does not attempt to account for these phenomena from an LFG perspective, but presents details of the phenomena requiring accounting for.