Sursurunga
RegionNew Ireland
Native speakers
(3,000 cited 1991)[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3sgz
Glottologsurs1246

Sursurunga is an Oceanic language of New Ireland.

Number

Sursurunga is famous for having a five-way grammatical number distinction. The numbers beside singular, dual, and plural have been called trial and quadral (Hutchisson 1986); however, these numbers, which only occur on pronouns, indicate a minimum of three and four, not exactly three and four the way the dual indicates exactly two.[2] They are equivalent to "a few" and "several", and Corbett has called them (lesser) paucal and greater paucal. The trial cannot be used for dyadic kinship terms, whereas the quadral is used for two or three such pair relationships.

References

  1. Sursurunga at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
  2. Corbett, Greville G., Number, Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics, P240.8.C67 2000, ISBN 0-521-64016-4


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