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Quantification in Nungon

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Handbook of Quantifiers in Natural Language: Volume II

Part of the book series: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy ((SLAP,volume 97))

Abstract

After presenting some basic genetic, historical and typological information about Nungon, this chapter outlines the quantification patterns it expresses. It illustrates various semantic types of quantifiers, such as generalized existential, generalized universal, proportional, definite and partitive which are defined in the Quantifier Questionnaire in chapter “The Quantifier Questionnaire”. It partitions the expression of the semantic types into morpho-syntactic classes: Adverbial type quantifiers and Nominal (or Determiner) type quantifiers. For the various semantic and morpho-syntactic types of quantifiers it also distinguishes syntactically simple and syntactically complex quantifiers, as well as issues of distributivity and scope interaction, classifiers and measure expressions, and existential constructions. The chapter describes structural properties of determiners and quantified noun phrases in Nungon, both in terms of internal structure (morphological or syntactic) and distribution.

Foremost thanks: to all my Nungon teachers; to community members who recorded dialogues and narratives for the Nungon corpus; and to Alexandra Aikhenvald and R.M.W. Dixon for their tutelage. This chapter stems from more than 9 months of monolingual fieldwork based in Towet village, Uruwa River valley, Papua New Guinea. Work was supported by grants from James Cook University and the Firebird Foundation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Finisterre-Huon group contains the most languages (at least 60) of any grouping within the proposed Trans-New Guinea Phylum.

  2. 2.

    Question words, especially ‘what’, are not uncommon ways for speakers to refer to languages or dialects in Papua New Guinea. See McElhanon (1974) on similar names for dialects of Kâte.

  3. 3.

    That is, disregarding a final velar nasal -ng added to all vowel-final verb roots.

  4. 4.

    Throughout this chapter, ‘paucal’ is used with its general meaning ‘few, limited’; there is no grammatical category ‘paucal’ in the Nungon number system.

  5. 5.

    The precise meaning of deengdeeng, apparently derived from the verb dee- ‘to tear (intrans.)’ is unclear, but here it supports the notion of ‘aloneness’.

  6. 6.

    The answer to the riddle: an onion.

  7. 7.

    The Tok Pisin loan piket may be related to either English big head or pig head. This is a common Tok Pisin word to be borrowed by Papuan languages; see Rumsey (2015).

  8. 8.

    Note that the standard expression ‘associative plural’ is used here even though oemna refers only to a couple; a more precise expression for the Nungon case would be ‘associative non-singular’, encompassing both dual and plural numbers.

  9. 9.

    In the Towet village dialect of Nungon, the intensifier hinom ‘very, true’, which can modify adjectives and nouns, forms part of euphemistic phrases referring to the elderly. Thus, in this dialect, amna hinom, which literally means ‘true/original man’, and its counterpart oe hinom ‘true/original woman’, are used to mean ‘elderly man’ and ‘elderly woman’.

  10. 10.

    Note that the Present tense here applies because the speaking took place within a few hours of the report.

Abbreviations

ADEM:

adverbial demonstrative

ADJ:

adjectivizer

ALT:

alternative question

AUTOREFL:

autoreflexive

BEN:

benefactive

COMIT:

comitative

COMPL:

completive

DEP:

dependent verb

DESID:

desiderative

DS:

different-subject

DU:

dual

DUB:

dubitative

EMPH:

emphatic

FOC:

focus

GEN:

genitive

IMM.IMP:

immediate imperative

INTENS:

intensifier

IRR:

irrealis

LDEM:

local nominal demonstrative

LOC:

locative

MV:

medial verb

NDEM:

NP-modifying demonstrative

NEAR:

near distance

NEG:

negative

NF:

near future

NMZ:

nominalizer

NP:

near past

NSG:

non-singular: more than one

O:

object

PERF:

perfect aspect

PL:

plural: more than two

PRES:

present

PRO:

personal pronoun

PROB:

probable

POSS:

possessive

RED:

reduplicated

REL:

relativizer

RESTR:

restrictive, exclusive

RF:

remote future

RP:

remote past

SEMBL:

semblance

SG:

singular

SPEC:

specifier

SUB:

subordinate

TOP:

topic

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

    Hannah Sarvasy

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  1. Hannah Sarvasy
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Correspondence to Hannah Sarvasy .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. LORIA (UMR 7503), CNRS, Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy, France

    Denis Paperno

  2. Dept. of Linguistics 3125 Campbell Hall, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA

    Edward L. Keenan

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Sarvasy, H. (2017). Quantification in Nungon. In: Paperno, D., Keenan, E. (eds) Handbook of Quantifiers in Natural Language: Volume II. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 97. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44330-0_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44330-0_12

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