Editing Grammatical number (section)

==Semantic versus grammatical number==
All languages are able to specify the quantity of referents. They may do so by [[lexicon|lexical]] means with words such as English ''a few'', ''some'', ''one'', ''two'', ''five hundred''. However, not every language has a grammatical category of number. Grammatical number is expressed by [[morphology (linguistics)|morphological]] or [[syntactic]] means. That is, it is indicated by certain grammatical elements, such as through [[affix]]es or number words. Grammatical number may be thought of as the indication of [[semantic]] number through [[grammar]].

Languages that express quantity only by lexical means lack a grammatical category of number. For instance, in [[Khmer language|Khmer]], neither nouns nor verbs carry any grammatical information concerning number: such information can only be conveyed by lexical items such as {{lang|km-Latn|khlah}} 'some', {{lang|km-Latn|pii-bey}} 'a few', and so on.<ref>{{Citation |title=Khmer |publisher=UCLA Language Materials project |contribution=Linguistic sketch |type=article |url=http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/Profile.aspx?LangID=75 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060211185103/http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/Profile.aspx?LangID=75 |access-date=2005-11-28 |archive-date=2006-02-11}}.</ref>