Two Accounts of Traditional Mangarevan Counting... and How to Evaluate Them

Authors

  • Andrea Bender University of Bergen

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15286/jps.122.3.275-288

Abstract

Among the traditional counting systems in Polynesian languages, those conveyed for Mangarevan provide particularly interesting and challenging cases. Accounting for their peculiarities presupposes accurate descriptions of their structure and key properties. Unfortunately, however, available descriptions are contradictory and partly incoherent. This paper attempts to resolve some of these contradictions by analysing and contrasting two accounts of Mangarevan counting and placing them in a cross-linguistic context.

Author Biography

Andrea Bender, University of Bergen

Andrea Bender completed her PhD in cultural anthropology at the University of Freiburg (Germany) and is now Professor of Psychology at the University of Bergen (Norway). She specialises in the interactions of culture, language and cognition, and has conducted extended fieldwork on Tonga. Her current research focuses on numeration systems and on how their culture-specific properties affect numerical cognition.

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Published

2013-12-21

Issue

Vol. 122 No. 3 (2013)

Section

Articles

License

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