Contact effects in nominal number systems

This paper is a comparative study of contact effects in nominal number systems, based on a sample of 49 pairs of languages in contact and focusing on pattern borrowing. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, we find that plural marking and number marking on nouns are the features most likely to display similar encodings across languages in contact. We also show that, though less frequent globally, duals are particularly sensitive to contact effects. The study confirms that inherent inflections are more likely to show contact effects than contextual inflections. It also shows that certain number distinctions are prone to contact-induced convergence regardless of their crosslinguistic frequency.