December 2021: Article in Language
My article “Demonstratives and visibility: Data from Ticuna and implications for theories of deixis” appears in the December 2021 issue of Language.
The article’s abstract reads:
In many Indigenous languages of the Americas, demonstratives are said to encode whether the referent is visible. Some scholars, however, argue that all visibility meanings in demonstratives are epiphenomenal on spatial, epistemic modal, or nonvision evidential content. Drawing on elicitation, experimental, and corpus data collected in fieldwork, I argue that two demonstratives of Ticuna (isolate; Brazil, Colombia, Peru) do display visibility meanings. These meanings are encoded and concern the sense of vision – not space, epistemic modality, or nonvisual forms of evidentiality. These findings support a view of demonstrative meaning as grounded in the perceptual capacities of the human body.
Read the article, which was published open access, here.
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