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Share Paper 3644

The Distribution of Nominal Quantifiers in a Digitized Corpus of St. Lawrence Island Yupik
Benjamin Hunt and Sylvia L.R. Schreiner
322-329 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

This paper presents a corpus study of the distributional characteristics of nominal quantifiers in St. Lawrence Island Yupik, an endangered Alaska Native language. The purpose of this study was to provide a greater understanding of Yupik nominal clauses and their internal structure with regard to quantification. Occurrences of nominal quantifiers were found through a preliminary search of Jacobson's (2001) grammar and Badten, et al.'s (2008) dictionary. A more exhaustive list of quantifiers to search for in the corpus was then established via targeted elicitation of quantifier word forms from a native speaker, using a novel visual elicitation procedure. The resulting list of quantificational elements was then used as input for a corpus study. A search of the digital corpus of written Yupik (Schwartz, et al. 2021) confirmed that case and number agree between nouns and their modifying quantifiers. Unexpectedly, the study also revealed a tendency for quantifiers to follow their nominal complements, rather than the opposite order (as would have been predicted based on previous documentation, de Reuse 1994). This study furthers the documentation of Yupik, thus contributing to typological work on understudied languages and laying the groundwork both for future theoretical analyses of nominal structure and quantification in the language, and for the development of additional pedagogical resources.

Published in

Proceedings of the 39th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Robert Autry, Gabriela de la Cruz, Luis A. Irizarry Figueroa, Kristina Mihajlovic, Tianyi Ni, Ryan Smith, and Heidi Harley
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Printed edition: $645.00