Article published in:
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. 230–238

Notes on plurality and the count/mass distinction in Guató

| Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
| 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
Article outline
  • 1.The Guató language
  • 2.Plural marking
    • 2.1The prefix bɛ- ‘3pl’
    • 2.2The prefix ka- ‘collective’
    • 2.3The suffix -d͡ʒĩ ‘pl’
  • 3.Numeral modification
  • 4.Quantification
    • 4.1 ku ‘be.over’
    • 4.2 pṹ and dí-tʃúmu
  • 5.Conclusion
  • The abbreviations used in this article are
  • References
Published online: 01 October 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.00017.god
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