The Morphosyntax of Classifiers in Anamuxra: Details of a Multiple Classifier System  

Oleh:

Ingram, Andrew

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Anthropological Linguistics (ada di JSTOR) vol. 45 no. 2 (Mar. 2003), page 129-168.
Fulltext: Vol. 45, No. 2, pp. 129-168.pdf (3.52MB)

Isi artikel

This article examines the grammatical properties of the multiple classifier system of Anamuxra, a language spoken in the Josephstaal region of Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. Classifiers in Anamuxra occur as suffix- es on a range of nominal words including: postpositive modifiers (adjectives, numerals, demonstratives, the specifier and indefinite articles, the general question word); the possessive word; the vocative; and nouns (common nouns, some proper nouns and some kin terms). Most, but not all, classifiers take the same form in the environments in which they occur. Different formal and semantic possibilities are found in different number categories (i.e., singular, dual, and plural) for certain animate classifiers. Syntactically, the four morpho- logical classifier construction types have distinct distributional and functional possibilities. However, none of the environments in which classifiers are found, can, on current evidence, be considered historically or functionally primary. As well as describing the classifier system in Anamuxra in its own right, this article also considers Anamuxra classifiers from a broader crosslinguistic typo- logical perspective.

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