ON THE TYPOLOGY OF LISTS CONTAINING MORE THAN 7 ELEMENTS

The goal of this paper is to show, in the absence of a natural restriction, the potential size of the enumerative construction and also to show various types of that construction. Some examples— for instance, a text by the Hawaiian Kumulipo—consist of more than one hundred appositional elements. These seem to contradict the general rule that no more than 7±2 homogeneous elements are possible in enumerations because in that case the reproduction of the text gives rise to great difficulties for memorization. Sometimes long constructions can be interpreted as combinations of several simple structures.

The structures of such long enumerations can be quite diverse, but for the most part they can be described using five main basic schemes or their combinations: a genealogical structure (X is a son of Y), complete syntactic parallelism but not genealogical (I greet you, X, who comes from Y, I have not Z), a constantly expanding chain (“This is the House That Jack Built”), iteration of the rheme (no text examples were found), the insertion of a foreign segment (“The Tale of the Nishon Shamaness”). In addition, for describing extended enumerative constructions it is important to note that they are all, with rare exceptions, are text fragments and not complete texts.