Defending Greenberg's Universal 20A: On the Putative [Classifier Noun Numeral] Construction in Tai‐Kadai

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the putative N‐intervening word order among Numeral (Num), Classifier (Clf), and Noun (N), that is, [Clf N Num], where the numeral is the indigenous one , found in 16 Asian languages, 15 Tai‐Kadai and one Austroasiatic, whose canonical word order is otherwise [Num Clf N]. This peculiar word order violates Greenberg's Universal 20A, that is, Num and Clf must be adjacent. Thus, the two N‐intervening orders, [Clf N Num] and [Num N Clf], are allegedly ill‐formed among the six mathematically possible word orders. A proposed explicit account for this N‐intervening construction in Maonan (Tai‐Kadai) argued that the putative numeral one is, in fact, a grammaticalized indefinite article instead, like a/an in English. The putative [Clf N Num] construction is thus [Clf N a/an ]. The goal of this study is to examine the relevant data from the other 15 languages with the same putative violation to Universal 20A comprehensively and extend this indefinite article account to resolve all such putative violations. We then demonstrate that in Tai‐Kadai languages with [N Num Clf] as the canonical order, the indigenous numeral one has likewise been grammaticalized as an indefinite article in the [N Clf a/an ] construction. Universal 20A is thus intact.