The semantic change of faqare (‘vertebra’, ‘unit’) as a numeral classifier in Persian

This article deals with an ongoing semantic change in which Persian faqare (‘vertebra’, or ‘unit’) is transitioning from a specific numeral classifier to a general numeral classifier in the grammatical construction Num + faqare + NP. In this transition the connections to the prototypical meanings of faqare are being weakened. This marks a late phase in the life cycle of a radial category, when the category is eroding, leading to productivity in the range of fillers for the NP slot. This late phase of radial categories has received little attention in the scholarly literature. We cite corpus data showing that a variety of factors contribute to the productive extension of faqare, including: context; the presence of prototypical collocates with faqare adjacent to the construction; and register, where mismatches produce humorous effects.