Dan Everett: Numeral Quantifiers in the l-node hypothesis (reply to Heidi Harley)

[Martha McGinnis]

The posting by Heidi is extremely interesting. The question of light
verbs she raises arises in other frameworks as the question of lexical
vs. morphological verbs. I hadn't realized that Persian is like this.
 From what Heidi describes, the only languages I was previously aware of
like this were languages of New Guinea (see especially Kalam, in
particular as it is described in Andrew Pawley's fascinating work) and
the Amazon, e.g. Piraha (which I have not written up well yet, though
there is a mention of this property in my sketch of Piraha in the
Handbook of Amazonian Languages, vol. 1). Piraha has at most 80-100 verb
roots, like Kalam, yet these do not correspond to basic kinds of
predicates that I have seen in any theory of lexical semantics. As
Pawley points out for Kalam, there are cultural templates of possible
events and event structures and the verb roots (this is true for Piraha
as well, I believe) can combine to form new verbs just in case they fit
the possible event template made available by Kalam/Piraha culture. Here
is a place where I would argue that culture, not the mind per se,
impinges directly on verbal morphology in a fascinating way, though how
it might be formalized in a tree structure may or may not turn out to be
interesting.

On number, there are languages (Piraha for sure, others probably) that
lack number altogether, yet have quantifiers based on individuated vs.
non-individuated (what one might otherwise have called 'count' vs.
'mass' distinctions) quantities. Peter Gordon, my wife, and I carried
out experiments among the Piraha and Peter wrote this all up ("Numerical
cognition without words: evidence from Amazonia for strong determinism".
I am not of the reference here. The email information I have to get the
full citation is: bmf2003 at columbia.edu.)

Best,

Dan


.........................
Dan Everett
Professor of Phonetics and Phonology
Department of Linguistics
Arts Building
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
M13 9PL
Manchester, UK
dan.everett at man.ac.uk