Number Expression in Apurinã (Arawák)

Abstract

Apurinã (Arawak), spoken along several tributaries of Purus River (Southwest of Amazonas State, Brazil), presents a plural morphological system that marks pronouns and nouns. The language has some free pronominal forms that distinguish singular from plural; additionally, it has bound pronominal forms, with singular/plural distinction made only in the first person for the enclitic forms. In the case of nouns, there are two suffixes that mark plural, -waku (that occurs only with [+human] nouns, as kyky-waku-ry (man-pl-m) ‘men’), and -ny (that can occurs both, with [+human] nouns, as in pupỹka-ry-ny-ry (indigenous person-m-pl-m) ‘indigenous people’; or [-human] nouns, as in aiku-ny-ry (house-pl-m) ‘houses’). The language also presents some quantifiers and numerals that encode number syntactically. The quantifiers are ithu, kaiãu and kuna kamuny to encode the notion of ‘much’, puiãu, referring to ‘some/few/little’, and ykyny to mean ‘all/every’. Additionally, there are the following numerals: (h)ãty(tu) ‘one’ and epi ‘two’, which combine to derive higher numbers, and the word for ‘hand’, waku/ piu, indicating the numeral five. Thus, the plural marking in the language can be marked in different ways, none of which is, however, required by the grammar. With that in mind, we discuss the extent to which plural marking is, to a great extent, constructed by the speakers in daily language use, according to whether it is contextually important to do so, and raise the question of the relevance of this problem to a computationally implementable grammar of the language

Yauti: A Tool for Morphosyntactic Analysis of Nheengatu within the Universal Dependencies Framework

“…Despite that, the enormous linguistic diversity in the country, represented by about 150 indigenous languages still alive, has been practically ignored. Only recently has attention been paid to these languages, with the creation of resources such as treebanks and the implementation of computational analysis tools, e.g., [Galves et al 2017, da Silva Facundes et al 2021, Gerardi et al 2021, Martín Rodríguez et al 2022. Worldwide, the computational processing of minority languages has enjoyed a growing interest, also on the part of information technology giants, e.g., [Bapna et al 2022].…”