查看文章

This paper describes expressions of quantity in the Amanuban dialect (henceforth Amanuban) of Uab Meto, a Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian language spoken in the South Central Timor Regency of East Nusa Tenggara by around 700,000 people (2009 census). Amanuban possesses an interesting set of quantity expressions that are used in different contexts. Most of the data used here is gathered from corpus data, with examples stemming from everyday communicative interactions in a variety of discourse situations. In terms of number words, Amanuban possesses cardinal and ordinal numerals, fractions and addition phrases, all of which are categorized into grammatical classes and combine differently with nouns depending on the cultural context. This study has also found that, generally, expressions of quantity behave as measurers and numeral classifiers. The measuring function can be observed in examples (1) and the classifying function in (2). Note that measuring terms can vary, depending on the properties of their referents, viz. examples (1a) and (1c), which contain different terms for ‘bunch’. 2 (1) a. laukhau futu mese b. sisi noni niim cassava CLF one meat CLF five ‘a bunch of cassava’‘five strings of meat’c. puah ki’ nua d. oe lanan nua areca. nut CLF two water CLF two ‘two bunches of areca nuts’‘take some water twice’(2) a. tui nono teun b. niti ta’u nee’pen CLF three bracelet CLF six ‘three pens’‘six bracelets’c. nu’e papa haa’wound CLF four ‘four wounds’1✉︎ jacobmetboki@ ymail. com, kr bellamy@ hum. leidenuniv. nl