Full Description
Demonstratives play a crucial role in the acquisition and use of language. Bringing together a team of leading scholars this detailed study, a first of its kind, explores meaning and use across fifteen typologically and geographically unrelated languages to find out what cross-linguistic comparisons and generalizations can be made, and how this might challenge current theory in linguistics, psychology, anthropology and philosophy. Using a shared experimental task, rounded out with studies of natural language use, specialists in each of the languages undertook extensive fieldwork for this comparative study of semantics and usage. An introduction summarizes the shared patterns and divergences in meaning and use that emerge.
Contents
Introduction: demonstratives - patterns in diversity Stephen C. Levinson; 1. The demonstrative questionnaire: 'this' and 'that' in comparative perspective David P. Wilkins; 2. Lao demonstrative determiners nii4 and nan4 - An intentionally discrete distinction for extensionally analogue space Nick Enfield; 3. Dalabon exophoric uses of demonstratives Sarah Cutfield; 4. Brazilian Portuguese - non-contrastive exophoric use of demonstratives in the spoken language Sergio Meira and Raquel Guirardello-Damian; 5. 'See this sitting one' - demonstratives and deictic classifiers in Goemai Birgit Hellwig; 6. Tzeltal - the demonstrative system Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson; 7. Yucatec demonstratives in interaction: spontaneous vs. elicited data Jürgen Bohnemeyer; 8. Lavukaleve - exophoric usage of demonstratives Angela Terrill; 9. Tiriyó - non-contrastive exophoric uses of demonstratives Sergio Meira; 10. Trumai - non-contrastive exophoric uses of demonstratives Raquel Guirardello-Damian; 11. Saliba - Exophoric demonstratives Anna Margetts; 12. Warao demonstratives Stefanie Herrmann; 13. Chukchi - non-contrastive spatial demonstrative usage Michael Dunn; 14. Yélî Dnye - demonstratives in the language of Rossel Island, Papua New Guinea Stephen C. Levinson; 15. Tidore - non-contrastive demonstratives Miriam van Staden; 16. The Jahai multi-term demonstrative system - what's spatial about it? Niclas Burenhult.
