Quantity expressions in the Gumer variety of Gurage

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate how entities are conceptualized and quantified in the Gumer Variety of Gurage, a South Ethiosemitic language. It specifically uncovered the linguistic means used to express quantity and how the quantity expressions interact with a noun head in an NP, the predicate verb, and grammatical categories, such as gender, number, and definiteness. The topic is one of the marginalized areas as we do not find investigation on Gurage languages and most Ethiopian languages. We used a cross-sectional qualitative methodology and a semi-structured key informants interview method. We found that nouns in the Gumer Gurage are not inflected for a number morphologically; thus, bet “house” can be singular or plural. There are, however, lexically distinct plurals (әrʧ “boy” and dengja “boys”; әram “a cow” and әraj “cows”). Numerical quantifiers and definite articles are also used to show plurality. The language distinguishes count and mass nouns semantically but not structurally. The count nouns require measure words in addition to the numeral quantifier as in (sost sin k’awa [three cup coffee “three cups of coffee”]), but not *sost k’awa. Syntactically, a numeral quantifier precedes classifiers, and a head noun follows. A quantifier agrees in number and gender, when the noun is human, with nouns and verbs in a clause.

Keywords

• Gumer Gurage
• Quantity expression
• Semantics
• Syntax