Correlation of textual and spatial reference

This and that

Francesca Merlan | Australian National University

This paper considers spatial/textual overlaps in the system of the three basic demonstrative categories, roughly translatable as ‘this’, ‘that’ and ‘yonder’ in Jawoyn, a Gunwinyguan language of the upper Northern Territory. The paper especially focuses on the proximal (‘this’) demonstrative in relation to the ‘that’ demonstrative, and argues that the former should be understood as a psycho-social category that implies ‘perceptual newness’, a concentration of focus, and unrecoverability from either prior discourse or assumable identifiability. The paper thus does not treat this ‘proximal’ demonstrative category a priori as grounded in some fixed spatial-locational sense, but as including semantic dimensions that enable its functioning as an index blending and expressing spatial differentiation in relation to other aspects of information, content and identifiability, including non-deictic socio-cultural ones. As always in demonstrative systems, its contrast with other demonstrative categories also conditions its indexical potential.

Published online: 18 February 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.18.10mer

References

Cutfield, Sarah

2011 Demonstratives in Dalabon: A Language of Southwestern Arnhem Land. PhD Dissertation, Monash University.

Enfield, Nick

2003 Demonstratives in space and interaction: Data from Lao speakers and implications for semantic analysis. Language 79: 82–117.

Evans, Nicholas

2003a Introduction: Comparative non-Pama-Nyungan and Australian historical linguistics. In Nicholas Evans, ed. The Non-Pama-Nyungan languages of Northern Australia: Comparative Studies of the Continent's most Linguistically Complex Region. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. 3–25.

2003b Bininj Gun-wok: A Pan-dialectal Grammar of Mayali, Kunwinjku and Kune. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

Hanks, William

2005 Explorations in the deictic field. Current Anthropology 46: 191–220.

Heath, Jeffrey

1984 Functional Grammar of Nunggubuyu. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.

Himmelmann, Nikolaus

1996 Demonstratives in narrative discourse: A taxonomy of universal uses. In Barbara Fox, ed. Studies in Anaphora. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 205–254.

Merlan, Francesca

1989 Some aspects of textual relations in Jawoyn, Northern Australia. In Mary Key & Henry Hoenigswald, eds. General and American Ethnolinguistics: In Remembrance of Stanley Newman. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 417–443.

O’Grady, Geoffrey, Carl Voegelin & Florence Voegelin

1966 Languages of the World: Indo-Pacific Fascile 6 (=AL 8, ii).

van Egmond, Marie-Elaine

2012 Enindhilyakwa Phonology, Morphosyntax and Genetic Position. PhD Dissertation, University of Sydney.