Quantification in Gitksan

Abstract

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of quantification in Gitksan, an endangered Interior Tsimshianic language spoken in British Columbia, Canada. This is the first published work devoted to the topic of quantification in any Tsimshianic language. The main syntactic and semantic division within the Gitksan system is between quantifiers over entities and quantifiers over events. Quantifiers over entities can be both D-type and A-type, but quantifiers over events are always A-type. While quantifiers over entities may be subdivided into universal and non-universal subcategories, no such clear-cut division holds within the class of event quantifiers. We include discussion of indefinite, existential, negative and interrogative expressions, and we introduce two aspects of Gitksan grammar which are particularly important in understanding the quantificational system: plurality and the count-mass distinction.