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A typology of the mass/count distinction in Brazil and its relevance for mass/count theories
Edited by Suzi Lima and Susan Rothstein
[Linguistic Variation 20:2] 2020
► pp. 300–311

Counting and measuring in Mẽbengokre and the count/mass distinction

| University of Ottawa

Though there is no formal differentiation between count and mass nouns in Mẽbengokre, a Jê language from central Brazil, a contrast can be seen in the coercion that numerals and some quantifiers induce in mass nouns. This coercion, that leads to both a type of and unit of readings, is the only type of discretization of mass concepts that can be done within a noun phrase in the language, as measure classifiers do not exist, something that we argue for in some detail.

Keywords: Mebengokre (Kayapó, Xikrin) language (ISO 639-3 code: txu), numerals, measures, classifiers, quantifiers
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Descriptive preliminaries
    • 2.1Quantifiers
    • 2.2Verbal number
    • 2.3Numerals
  • 3.The count-mass distinction in Mẽbengokre
  • 4.Measures, inherent and conventional, but of no other sort
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 1 October 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.00022.sal
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