Lecture | LUCL Colloquium - Lunch Series '23/'24
Demonstratives: spatial, interactional, and sensory perspectives
- Date
- Thursday 14 March 2024
- Time
- Location
-
- Room
- 0.08A
Abstract
Demonstratives (words like this and that) are crucial component parts of the human communication engine. Every language on the planet has this closed grammatical class of forms that functions as a speaker’s foremost linguistic device for indicating referents and for coordinating the addressee’s attention to those referents. But even though the universal and fundamental nature of demonstratives is generally agreed upon, and their grammatical properties are rather well understood within and across languages, their semantic and pragmatic underpinnings are still surprisingly unclear and energetically debated. One school of thought argues that demonstratives represent a primarily spatial system of distinctions that originates egocentrically in the speaker’s body. Others propose that it is interactional parameters that determine demonstrative function. Such parameters include, for example, the addressee’s attentional or epistemic relationship with the intended referent. This debate reflects the tension inherent to the dual functional premise of the demonstratives themselves, namely between their spatial and interactional givens. In this talk I address the issue in light of languages with unusually rich demonstrative systems, that is, those that display functional distinctions beyond the common two or three-form systems. I argue that such elaborate systems – sometimes with five, six or even ten distinctions – provide interesting opportunities to untangle the functional parameters at work, and offer fresh perspectives on the deictic field. I illustrate with examples from lesser-known languages of Southeast Asia, with particular focus on Jahai, an Austroasiatic language of the Malay Peninsula.
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