Keywords
Demonstratives
Rikbaktsa
Amerindian languages
How to Cite
Abstract
The paper investigates the count-mass distinction in Rikbaktsa (Macro-Jê). It presents the results of data collected following Lima and Rothstein’s questionnaire (2020). The data was gathered using an unpublished corpus, the scarce literature on this language (Boswood 1971, 1978; SIL 2007; Silva 2011), and elicitation with a native speaker. The analysis shows that there is plural morphology which does not combine with mass nouns. Nouns that denote stable atoms combine directly with numerals. Substance nouns require measure phrases to be counted. These are indications that this language can be classified as a number marking language (Chierchia 2010, 2015), even if there are some mass nouns that combine directly with numerals. None of the fifteen languages in Lima & Rothstein (2020) are reported to have a specialized mass morpheme. Chacon (2012) claims that Kubeo (Tukano-Oriental) has a demonstrative for mass. This is also the case in Rikbaktsa, but in Rikbaktsa, it is spread across the grammar: the demonstrative na ‘this’ combines with a third person marker on the personal pronoun a-na, with interrogative proforms, and in attributive constructions. This study contributes to a better understanding of count-mass distinction across languages and of the grammar of this minority language.
References
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Copyright (c) 2021 Érica Milani Dellai, Vitória Maria Jasper Ern, Léia de Jesus Silva, Roberta Pires de Oliveira, Beatriz Martins Rachadel, Bianca Maria de Souza
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