Semantic bases and functions of noun categorization mechanism on South American indigenous languages

• Autor(a) principal: Regúnaga, María Alejandra
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: spa
• Título da fonte: Revista Brasileira de Linguística Antropológica (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.unb.br/index.php/ling/article/view/21056
• topic: Indigenous languages. Noun classification. Gender. Morphology. Semantics.; Lenguas indígenas. Clasificación nominal. Género. Morfología. Semántica.

Languages frequently present a grammatical system for categorizing the referents of nouns.These mechanisms, whether the type of gender, class or nominal classifiers, are generallybased on semantic features and they exhibit assignment criteria which usually respond tothe meaning of the noun or certain properties of its referent. This paper proposes an analysiscontrasting nominal categorization systems in a number of indigenous languages of SouthAmerica. The objective of the research is to investigate (i) the semantic foundationsoperating in the different languages, both those with traditional systems of gender and thosewhich add another procedure based on semantic features different of sex and animacy;and (ii) the function of classifier mechanisms, particularly in cases where some process ofnominal derivation is verified.