Number Marking in English and Thali: A Contrastive Study

The aim of this paper is to explore the number system in Thali, a variety of Punjabi spoken by natives of Thal desert. There are three number categories singular, dual, and plural but all modern Indo Aryan languages have only singular and plural (Bashir & Kazmi, 2012, p. 119). It is one of the indigenous languages of Pakistan from the Lahnda group as described by Grierson (1819) in his benchmark book Linguistic Survey of India. Layyah is one of the prominent areas of Thal regions. The native speakers of Thali use this sub dialect of Saraiki in their household and professional life. The linguistic boundaries of the present Siraiki belt have changed under different linguistic variational rules as described by Labov (1963), Trudgal (2004), Eckert (2002) and Meryhoff (2008). There are many differences between Thali and Saraiki, on phonological, morphological and orthographical levels. Husain (2017) has pointed out linguistic differences between Saraiki and Lahnda and Thali is one of the popular languages of Lahnda spoken in different parts of Thal regions. According to the local language activists, Thali has been greatly influenced by Saraiki and Punjabi. The lexicon of Thali is composed for 20% of Punjabi, 45% of Saraiki, and 5% of loan words particularly English. Another particularity is that Perso-Arabic characters are used to write Thali. The most distinguishing characteristics of Thali are its parts of speech, word order, case marking, verb conjugation and, finally, usage of grammatical categories in terms of number, person, tense, voice and gender. In this perspective, number marking is the area to focus on noun morphology and exclusively on the recognition of number system in Thali nouns. The analysis of linguistic systems including grammar, lexicon, and phonology provide sound justifications of number marking systems in languages of the world (Chohan & García, 2019).

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Verbal
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Numbe
There are w is big que number in etc. or is th the case of some spec

Numbe
Number m estimated some stud other hand "books" is singular su According marking n or plural n for fulfillin central to l In this resp common in cases, it is category. I

Associ
According distinction further den The table shows the plural form is used for these nouns of English and Thali, where more than one entity is available in the table of comparison.
Class 2: nouns with two forms: singular-dual In class 2 nouns, a plural number is expressed by two forms, firstly, a singular form and secondly, a dual form.

Class 3: nouns of three forms: singular-dual-plural
In class 3 nouns, there are three forms for expressing different number of entities. In this way, a singular, a dual and plural forms are used to express precisely a number of two, three and more than three entities in languages like English and Thali.

Class 4: nouns of three forms: singular-plural-dual
Class 4 nouns have three forms for expressing different number of entities. In this way, a singular, a dual and plural forms are used to express precisely a number of two, three and more than three entities in languages like English and Thali. According to Fenech (1996) use the term 'real dual' which expresses specifically two entities. This 'real dual' is connected with nouns of class 4.
It has been observed that the dual forms of class 3 and 4 are similar. As well as the dual forms of Class 2 and Class 1 are similar in morphological structure. Accordingly, classes 3 and 4 nouns hold a paradigm having three forms. This paradigm shows a striking similarity to the classes 1 and 2 which contain not any form which is singular.

The Realization of the Marks
In this analysis part it clearly shows the series of analysis in which number marking system is explained with suitable examples and is presented with the marking mechanism which makes the structure of different forms of singular, the dual, and the plural in English and Thali. As it is shown that number marking is morphological marking where singular is unmarked, suffixation is used to mark dual and suffixation is also used for marking plural. Some other morphological processes are also used for marking plural nouns.

Singular
When noun is in the singular form it is unmarked (neutral). This notion provides basis to place nouns in the dual and plural categories. By keeping in view the collected data,

Analysis
The following hypotheses provide the parameters to analyze how to make a vivid situation of the realization of different numbers which can be counted as three on Thali nouns system. The occurrence of these numbers have been minutely focused and analyzed why very few nouns keep a specific form for representing each and every number.
Finally, at the end, the following solution was proposed:

Hypotheses for the Study
There are following three hypotheses to analyze the process of number marking: H 1: A hypothesis is planned by contrasting two sides one is labelled as "a three slot paradigm" and the other can be presented for putting three classes of different nouns. H 2: 'Thali keeps a number system of nouns which can be interpreted as a kind of dichotomy where the category of singular is exactly opposite to non-singular' as proposed by Corbett (2000). He says that only two slots are with the noun paradigm. In this case, another type of noun is the deviant category Class 3 and it has minor number.
On the contrary, Class 3 becomes an exception and majority of nouns are in this category of nouns. This does not interpret the notion of identity among classes 1, 2 & 3 which can be labelled as non-singular while the others are dual and plural.  The examples show that particular meaning and specific morphological form is possessed by each form. The second point is dealt with the clarity that three above mentioned noun classes are homogenous without any defection.

Proposition of Solution
According to the proposal three forms are possessed by Class 1 but there is no difference between dual and plural form, these are similar. On the other hand, three forms are possessed by Class 2 but here also plural and dual forms are similar. The result has been obtained by employing rules of referral demarcated by Zwicky (1991).
Rule A and Rule B provide a descriptive summary of classes 1, 2 & 3.
Rule A: the plural is referred for making Class 1 nouns as dual Rule B: the dual is referred for making Class 1 nouns as plural It has been observed that particular forms are selected to express particular meaning in day to day communication. The proposed analysis is not constructed on the similar forms because the rules of referral describes the way of copying the form for creating another form in the linguistic structure. Resultantly, a detailed description is obtained with planned paradigms. In this situation, the similarity of non-singular forms is captured.