Abstract
This article examines quantification in Nen, a Papuan language of the Yam family (aka Morehead-Maro family) from Southern New Guinea. Nen counts some 400 speakers, most living in the single village of Bimadbn. Typologically, Nen is an SOV language with ergative case-marking, agreement on the verb for up to two arguments, and a split in verbal agreement patterns between active and stative predicates.
With regard to quantification, the most interesting features of Nen are its complex system for composing number by integrating partial or disjoint number specifications (e.g. ‘non-dual, i.e. singular or more than two’) from a number of morphological sites. For many values this results in non-monotonic processes of composition. Composition from a number of sites is also a feature of temporal semantics, e.g. bidirectional time adverbs (yesterday/tomorrow) whose exact reference is selected by the verbal semantics. Numerals exhibit an unusual senary system, including monomorphemic roots for powers of six up to 65; grammatical number is also unusual, with several lines of evidence suggesting that the dual is the unmarked number with regard to verbal morphology. The language has rich systems of indefinite and negative pronouns and distributive numerals, and an entrenched count vs mass distinction, interestingly linked to a lack of general quantificational interrogatives for mass expressions. The existence of double agreement on the verb eliminates many classic scope ambiguities with regard to universal and existential quantifiers. Finally, an unusual conflation of ‘all’ and ‘most’ in the main relevant D-quantifier is problematic for standard accounts of quantity implicature.
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Notes
- 1.
Literally this means ‘bad smell’; the connection between uncountability and smell being explained to me as due to the fact that there are an unlimited variety of smells.
- 2.
The debate on how to analyse such languages has a long tradition. Jelinek’s (1984) well-known proposal that the arguments in a language like Warlpiri are represented by bound clitics, rather than the free NPs, has since met with counter-arguments pointing out that this only captures only part of the argumental syntax of the language (Austin and Bresnan 1996), and analyses based on unification of both bound and free material have put forward by Australian languages by e.g. Nordlinger (1998, 2014) and Evans (2003).
- 3.
Nen is typologically unusual in the degree to which the dual can be regarded as the unmarked number value in many respects. In addition to the fact that duals in the imperfective (the most basic aspect) are marked zero in opposition to non-zero marking for the non-duals, we can cite the greater resemblance of infinitives to inflected dual forms than non-dual forms (cf aebyängs ‘to fly’, naebyängt ‘they two fly’, naebnde ‘(s)he flies’, naebndat ‘they (more than two) fly’), and the fact that some non-dual stems require overt infixation based on the unmarked dual stem: amzs ‘to sit down’, namzt ‘they two sit down’, nam n zte ‘(s)he sits down’, nam n ztat ‘they (more than two) sit down’.
- 4.
The privative suffix –pnär is not available for the type of NP-level negation this represents.
- 5.
dgae would be an acceptable alternative to dga here.
- 6.
Perhaps because ämb can also mean ‘some’, there is a tendency to combine ämbs with má ‘still, just’ when meaning ‘once’.
- 7.
In local English, which is non-standard, speakers often translate this as ‘the majority’, however this should not be taken literally since I have recorded many contexts where it means ‘all’, as in examples (36) and (37).
- 8.
Note that the all meaning is available with means ‘all’ with countables only, e.g. *Nänzi mñtes ym, …. ynadbnan ynd gbres ynetan is unacceptable for ‘The banana was delicious, so I ate all of it.’, i.e. gbres cannot mean ‘all of’ a single object, if combined with just a singular undergoer prefix. However, it is possible to use this if one adds the multa prefix: Kaeko mñtes tm, ynadbnan ynd gbres tngnetan ‘the scrub fowl was delicious, so I ate all of it’; here tngnetan is simply the β-series correspondent of yngnetan in (39b).
- 9.
There is no syntactically distinct passive construction in Nen, but a comparable discourse effect can be obtained by omitting or postposing the agent argument, as in this example.
- 10.
-s is also the infinitive suffix, and historically it is plausible to derive it from the restrictive meaning (i.e. ‘only’ the action, without further specification of subject, object, or TAM information). A further detail concerns how restriction is applied to verbs: unlike other word classes (nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals) they cannot just host –s to give a restrictive meaning. Instead, there is a special structure for expressing meanings like ‘he only looked, but didn’t see’: the infinitive, preceded by má and suffixed by (e)s, is combined with an inflected form of the same verb. Thus in the following example raes ‘to look’ appears twice, once in the infinitive flanked by má and –s, and then a second time in the inflected 3sg form nrate: Bä má raises aba nrate, yao yinḡnda. ‘He only looked, but he didn’t see.’
- 11.
Recall (Table 1) that large plurals are expressed, just with middle verbs, by combining the non-singular undergoer prefix with the third singular actor suffix.
- 12.
This meaning could be made more explicit as sombes yép leis [two bag rice], but the use of yép is not necessary to induce this reading.
- 13.
And note the large plural object construction on the verb, with its combination of 3rd singular undergoer prefix and multal prefix.
- 14.
The o- attaches in the diathetic prefix slot, looking like it derives a new stem, though this is anomalous in that all other transitive stems in Nen are consonant initial. Likewise the prefix k- is identical to the β-form of the middle prefix, but unlike the middle prefix it is still used in TAM conditions where the α-form would be used.
- 15.
The ‘towards’ form of this, used if they were shooting on their way to the deictic centre, would be k < n > onamt, again illustrating infixation inside the dual distributive prefix.
- 16.
Since quantifiers cannot bear case-marking it is likely that the reason for this is to avoid certain ambiguities that would otherwise arise, in cases of the type N1 Q N2 – should Q be interpreted as a post-head modifier to N1, or a pre-head modifier to N2? Likewise, when it occurs in preverbal position in a sequence N1 N2 Q V, should it be interpreted as a floated quantifier modifying N1, or a post-head modifier to N2? The requirement that posthead modifiers be followed by a repeater noun resolves this problem: it can only be interpreted as a posthead modifier if it is followed by a repeat of the head, and this then seals it off from a position where it could be parsed as either a prehead modifier in a different NP, or a floated quantifier.
- 17.
As in many other languages, the polar interrogative marker is homophonous with the word for ‘what’ (cf Indonesian apa). It is also homophonous with the name of the language, given the widespread regional practice of naming languages after their word for ‘what’.
- 18.
E.g. Nambis ärm sombes pusngama ämbs prta nänzi kp tänetat ‘three men ate thirty six bananas, twelve each’.
- 19.
In the version given here, speakers used the distributive quantifier bambyamae rather than the universal quantifier gbres inside the subject NP, but gbres would also be possible.
- 20.
Building indefinite pronouns on interrogatives is of course a cross-linguistically common strategy, e.g. Japanese ikuraka ‘some (number)’, from ikura ‘how many’, or Tamil ettanai-yoo < ettanai from ‘how many’. See Haspelmath (1997, 2013a, b) for an excellent typological survey of indefinite pronouns, including many other examples of this strategy.
- 21.
Here I skirt interesting questions about whether indefinite pronouns receive a full and satisfying characterisation within the parameters of current versions of formal logic (most simply by representation through existential quantification), or whether it is better to adopt a more cognitivist (or even intercognitivist) position which treats identifiability by the speaker (perhaps also the hearer) as a central part of their meaning. See Wierzbicka (1980) for an interesting discussion of these problems, as they pertain to Russian indefinite pronouns such as kto-to and kto-nibud’.
- 22.
Morphologically this is a reduplication of dene ‘thus, like this’, suffixed with the restrictive clitic –s.
- 23.
While many verbs in Nen are biaspectual, occurring with either perfective or imperfective-series inflections, there are many that are restricted to inflections of just one of these series. What is of special interest here is that even ‘perfective-only’ verbs use the imperfective series just when they have large plural objects. See Evans (2015a) for initial discussion.
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Acknowledgment
I would like to thank Ed Keenan and Denis Paperno for their kind invitation to submit a chapter to this volume, Denis Paperno and an anonymous referee for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter, Jeff Siegel, Christian Döhler and Wayan Arka for discussions of how quantification works in other languages of southern New Guinea, Susan Ford for assistance with preparing the manuscript, and the following organisations for financial support of my work on Nen: the Australian Research Council (Grants: Languages of Southern New Guinea and The Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity), the Volkswagen Foundation (DoBES project ‘Nen and Tonda’), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Anneliese Maier Forschungspreis), the Australian National University (Professorial Setup Grant) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL). Most importantly, I think the entire population of Bimadbn village for their hospitality and friendship, and especially Jimmy Nébni, Michael Binzawa, Yosang Amto and Goe Dibod for their finely attuned discussions of how quantification works in Nen.
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Evans, N. (2017). Quantification in Nen. 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_11
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