The adverbial quantification in Karitiana

Author(s)

Luciana Sanchez Mendes

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2009-07-03

Examining board members

Ana Lucia de Paula Muller; Marcelo Barra Ferreira; Roberta Pires de Oliveira

• Advisor: Ana Lucia de Paula Muller

Abstract

This dissertation presents both a description and a semantic analysis of the quantificational adverbs kandat, ahop and pitat a lot/many times in Karitiana, a Brazilian language from the Tupi Stock, Arikém family, using the concepts of Formal Semantics. From the morphosyntactic point of view, this work demonstrates that the items under discussion are quantifiers related to verbal predicates rather than to nominal quantifiers. They are analyzed as adverbs, kandat having a syntactic distribution identical to all the other adverbs in the referred language, whereas ahop and pitat form a compound with the verb they are associated with. From the semantic point of view, kandat and ahop are treated as frequency adverbs. We propose a revision of the frequency operation, taking into account Rothsteins 1999, 2004, 2008a, 2008b proposal that there is a countable nature to the verbal domain, that is, the verbal domain does not have a mass/count distinction similar to the one found in the nominal domain. The frequency operation is understood here as a direct counting in the countable domain of events that does not depend on any special component of the quantifiers. The analysis we propose differs from the one in Doetjes 2007; this author, following Bach 1986, considers that verbal predicates are divided into count and mass, and the frequency operation is carried out by the operators in these two contexts, because of a special component that they possess. Our approach to frequency also partially differs from De Swarts 1993 proposal, in which she elaborates different solutions for proportional and non-proportional uses of the adverbs involved in the mentioned operation. The present work offers a more economic proposal for the different uses of frequency adverbs, taking into account data from French (Doetjes 2007 and De Swart 1993), Brazilian Portuguese and Karitiana. Pitat, on the other hand, is considered a quantificational adverb of degree which, unlike frequency quantifiers, has a special component that allows either quantification over occurrences or a degree specification. The analysis presented here shows, based on data from the three languages previously mentioned (and their possible readings), that it is more interesting to assume that its the degree adverbs that have an exclusive component as opposed to the frequency ones. This work therefore proposes an analysis of the quantifiers kandat, ahop and pitat in Karitiana based on a theoretical revision of frequency and degree quantification supported by data from three different languages. (AU)