The count/mass distinction in Taurepang

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents a description of the count/mass distinction in Taurepang, a Cariban language spoken in Brazil and Venezuela. The methodology used was based on Lima & Rothstein’s questionnaire (this volume). We show that Taurepang is a bare noun language and that mass and count nouns can be pluralized. Despite nominal quantifiers have the same distribution, they show different interpretation with count and mass nouns. As the data also shows that numerals distinguish count and mass nouns and that container phrases trigger the count/measure interpretation, we assume here that the denotation of mass nouns in Taurepang cannot be count.