3.5. Hypotheses The main prediction for our study is that numeral incorporation is the result of a language change process, specifically a grammaticalization process. The property of language change that we will be testing on the basis of corpus data is the progressive change in language usage throughout time. Following the apparent time hypothesis (see also ; Bailey et al. 1991), we will test this by looking at the different age groups represented in the corpus and comparing their language use.
