Mass nouns in Yungur: granular, liquid and apparent masses

International audience Yungur [bena1260] is one of the Buto languages, a small group of Niger-Congo languages spoken in the northeast of Nigeria. Nouns referring to mass concepts are distributed across several classes in Yungur that show interesting differences in their morphosyntax. Granular masses, such as bààmà ‘chaff’, can be considered to be prototypical mass nouns from the point of view of Yungur morphosyntax. Thus, although they can be modified by numerals, they do not have a separate plural form and they can be quantified only in the distributive plural sense, as packaging or sortal plurals. By default, they are used with pluractional verbs, such as hāā ‘take (several)’, implying that the action affects either the entirety or any unspecified part of the mass. The other groups of nouns referring to mass concepts differ from this core group in different ways. For example, nouns referring to liquid masses, such as mbə̄rã̄ã́ ‘water’, that in order to be handled need to be contained in containers, are by default used with singulative verbs, such as tóó ‘take (one)’.