Notes on plurality and the count/mass distinction in Guató

Gustavo Godoy | Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

Walter Alves | Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

Guató is an isolate, nearly extinct indigenous language. Only two elders, VS and EF, remember it. They both live in the Pantanal (State of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil). Despite the decline in the number of speakers due to farmers’ invading land that once belonged to Indigenous people, new research has been conducted, resulting in a description of some aspects of its grammar. This paper shows the distribution of plural affixes, as used by EF. In Guató, all nouns combine directly with numerals, whether these nouns are mass or count. The language grammaticalizes the mass-count distinction only in the interpretation of quantifiers.

Keywords: Guató, indigenous languages, mass/count distinction, quantification

Published online: 01 October 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.00017.god

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