Linguistic change has always been central to the concerns of linguistics. From the dawn of the 19th century, linguists, inspired by recent discoveries about the evolution of species, sought to uncover the evolutionary mechanisms of natural languages. This project has continued generation after generation, both simplified by new technologies and theoretical advances, and made more complex by the proliferation of sources and observable phenomena. Today, the dynamics of transformation in linguistic structures and language itself remain at the heart of language sciences, and countless team projects, publications, and presentations focus on this topic. Numerals and classifiers, found across many languages ​​and often possessing particular characteristics—not only syntactic but also lexical, morphological, or phonological—have been the subject of relatively little research. They nevertheless offer a rich insight into the mechanisms of ongoing linguistic change, often being highly open to borrowing and phonological mutations, but also frequently constituting conservative pockets within the lexicon. This project aims to describe numerals, numeral classifiers, and measure words from phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic perspectives, and to account for their variability in order to better understand their evolution. This project thus intends to contribute to the understanding of linguistic change.

For linguistics, the 19th century was characterized by an extraordinary development of the discipline. The period has not only been marked by numerous theoretical approaches (structuralism, generative grammar, cognitive sciences, etc.) but it has also witnessed important discoveries which strengthened our knowledge of languages. Although many questions remain unanswered and research continues in several areas, it seems that the process of historicization is already underway, allowing for a reflexive and critical approach to linguistics as a discipline. The historiography of linguistics not only allows us to better understand our biases and how our perceptions are influenced but also to recontextualize theories and situate them within a continuum. Furthermore, given that the discipline has been built on strong oppositions — as the Neogrammarian controversy, the debate surrounding the question of the deep structure, etc. — it seems essential to question the notions of rupture and continuity.

We are particularly interested in the question of linguistic change, which cannot be limited to the diachrony/synchrony dichotomy, in the various theories that have succeeded one another, but also in the concept of variation.