(Im)possible Constituent Orders: Nominals, Numerals, Classifiers and Ordinal Markers

By investigating ordinals in a wide range of languages, this paper addresses a puzzle regarding (im)possible constituent orders of nominals, numerals and ordinal markers, which is similar to Greenberg’s (1972) observation about constituent orders of nominals, quantifiers and classifiers. I propose that my observation and Greenberg’s (1972) observation can be captured by assuming that ordinal markers occur in the same positions as numeral classifiers.