Magdalena Lemus Serrano (DDL)
"Gender and classifiers in Yukuna"
This talk will provide overview of the grammatical systems of noun categorization in Yukuna, namely, gender and numeral classifiers. These two systems differ on virtually all grounds, from the loci of marking, to inventory size, semantics, and even frequency of use. Indeed, the gender system distinguishes two classes , feminine (female animates) and non-feminine (male animates, objects), and it is optionally marked on nouns, noun adjuncts (demonstratives, numerals, adjectives), and nominalizations. Classifiers form a single, small paradigm of roughly a dozen suffixes that encode salient physical features of objects, optionally marked on numerals only. While gender plays an important role in the grammar of the language due to its use in nominalizations, classifiers have slowly fallen out of use and are rarely used by younger speakers of Yukuna.
After describing the main features of gender and classifiers in Yukuna, this talk will place the language within a genealogical and areal context, contrasting the Yukuna data with closely related Arawakan languages as well as with neighboring, unrelated languages such as Tanimuka (Tukanoan).
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