The status of classifiers in Tibeto-Burman languages

Abstract

Tibeto-Burman languages present some unusual word order combinations which violate Hawkins’ (1983) implicational universals: RelN&NNum, RelN& NDem, and AdjN&NNum. I argue that classifiers, which have been neglected in studies of noun phrase word order typology, play a central role in accounting for so-called violations of implicational universals. Based on the evidence of the development of classifier and NP-internal word order variations, it is proposed that the unit they form with the numeral acts as a head of the noun phrase. As heads, they circumvent the universal violations and play a distinct structural role between languages with classifiers and those without them.