Nominal countability in Kaingang and beyond

Abstract

This paper is the first investigation of nominal countability in Kaingang, a Jê language spoken in Brazil. The main claim of this paper is that all Kaingang nouns are lexically count. This hypothesis is supported by a number of morphosyntactic and semantic properties of nouns in the language. Among them two crucial properties emerge: (i) Kaingang allows numerals and other count quantity expressions to combine directly with individual and substance nouns, and (ii) in quantity judgement tasks (Barner & Snedeker 2005) comparisons with both types of nouns are cardinality-based. I analyze this generalized counting strategy as a direct effect of the lexical semantics of nouns. Building on Krifka’s approach (1989; 2007; 2008), I argue that all Kaingang nouns are born quantized, i.e., they are lexically equipped with a context-sensitive built-in counting function that measures quantities in terms of individual- or portion-units. This paper contributes with additional crosslinguistic evidence to two claims: (i) that the mass/count distinction in the nominal domain isn’t a language universal (Wiltschko 2012), and (ii) that the defining property of count nouns is quantization, rather than atomicity (Krifka 1989; 2007).

Keywords

• count
• quantization
• substance nouns
• mass/count
• Jê