Count and Mass Nouns in Dëne S né
نویسنده
چکیده
Dëne S né (short: Dëne), an Athapaskan language of Northern Canada, does not have any number-related grammatical categories in the nominal domain. Word order is SOV; nominals are optional (Cook 2004, Rice & Saxon 2005). The language lacks articles, case markers, etc., so that when nominal constituents occur, they are often bare nouns. (1) shows bare noun subjects, objects, and postpositional objects. There is also no nominal number inflection—except for kinship terms (cf. Wilhelm 2006), nouns have the same form in singular and plural contexts: In the (a) examples of (2)– (3), an inherently singular verb provides the singular context, in the (b) examples, the plural context is given by an inherently plural verb. The relevant nominal argument does not change in form. 1
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