Gender and classificatory suffixes of discretization in Ocaina (Witoto)

• Autor(a) principal: Fagua Rincón, Doris
• 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/21060
• topic: Gender. Classificatory suffixes. Ocaina. Witotoan. Amazon.; Género. Sufijos clasificatorios. Ocaina. Witoto. Amazonia.

Ocaina has both gender markers and classificatory discretization suffixes (cf. classifiers), areal and typological feature under-documented. Gender classifies the nominal lexicon into animate vs inanimate and reflects beyond the noun itself through agreement: pronominal forms. The second category appears directly on the morphology of the subclasses generic and mass nouns (cf. uncountable nouns). It is not a classificatory noun device but the way in which nouns specified with these suffixes became discret: for this reason they are told “clasificatory discretization” suffixes. This paradigm is one of the means marking the singular number category. We distinguish the “gender” or “grammatical gender” category, a classificatory device, from “semantic gender”: masculin vs femenin, marks that belong to the paradigm of discretizer suffixes (number category).