In my last post I discussed the concept of deixis and illustrated deictic demonstratives in Pnar. Pnar's deictic demonstrative system combines gender clitics with largely distance-based deictic morphemes, so there are potentially twenty demonstrative forms that identify nominal distance in relation to the deictic center, which can be either Speaker or Addressee, depending on the context. I'm still trying to figure out which for some forms.

Because discussion of deixis is not uniform, I decided to limit myself only to forms which served a nominal demonstrative functon: those words which point out the distance of a noun from a deictic center, or exist in a paradigm with words that do. This excludes a lot of Tibeto-Burman verbal affixes which encode direction (uphill, downhill, across, etc..), and was necessary to keep the talk short enough for the conference. I worked from existing descriptions of neighboring and related languages, and unfortunately some of the languages have little to no description, descriptions that made little to no reference to demonstratives, or I couldn't get ahold of the reference in time. So here is a table with some of my findings:

I think a few things are worth noting here. First, all languages in my sample have at least a proximal/distal distinction. Second, Tibeto-Burman languages in my sample vary widely in terms of how many distinctions they encode in demonstratives. Third, Austroasiatic languages have the largest number of distinctions in their demonstratives, having at least four in each language. However, they are not uniform in terms of which distinctions they make - Pnar, while it has five distance-based demonstratives, has no 'up' or 'down' (in some descriptions 'upstream' or 'downstream') that is part of the demonstrative paradigm.

In terms of language contact, it is interesting to consider that Ao, Karbi, and Garo (which only have a dual distinction according to the descriptions I read) have had considerable contact with Indo-Aryan languages which have only a dual distinction. It is worth noting that Ao also has a non-visible/anaphoric marker that was not considered by Coupe (2007) to be a demonstrative, but may well be (personal communication).

There are many more interesting thoughts that could be drawn from this brief look at deictic demonstrative systems, and I hope these posts have helped you think about the system in your own language or languages you work on. Feel free to leave thoughts, suggestions, corrections, and general comments below!

References:
Baclawski Jr., Kenneth. 2013. Deictics and related phenomena in Kuki-Chin. Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH: ICSTLL 46. Benjamin, Geoffrey. 1976. An outline of Temiar grammar. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publications 129–187.
Brown, Nathan. 1848. Grammatical notices of the Asamese language. Sibsagor: American Baptist Mission Press.
Burenhult, Niclas. 2008. Spatial coordinate systems in demonstrative meaning. Linguistic Typology 12:99–142.
Burling, Robbins. 2004. The language of the Modhupur Mandi (Garo), volume 1: Grammar. New Delhi: Bibliophile South Asia, in association with Promilla and Co., Publishers.
Coupe, A. R. 2008. A Grammar of Mongsen Ao. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Dasgupta, Probal. 2003. Bangla. In The Indo-Aryan langauges, ed. George Cardona and Dhanesh Jain, 351–390. New York: Routledge.
Diffloth, Gérard. 1976. Jah-Hut: An Austroasiatic language of Malaysia. In Southeast Asian linguistic studies 2 , ed. Nguyen Dang Liem, Pacific Linguistics C-42, 73–118. Canberra: Australian National University.
Ghosh, Arun. 2008. Santali. In The Munda Languages, ed. Gregory D. S. Anderson, 11–98. New York: Routledge.
Henderson, Eugénie J. A. 1965. Tiddim Chin: A descriptive analysis of two texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Imai, Shingo. 2003. Spatial deixis. Doctoral Dissertation, SUNY Buffalo.
Konnerth, Linda Anna. 2014. A grammar of Karbi. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Oregon.
Kruspe, Nicole. 2004. A grammar of Semelai. Cambridge University Press.
Matisoff, James A. 1973. A Grammar of Lahu. University of California Publications in Linguistics, 75. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nagaraja, K. S. 1985. Khasi, a descriptive analysis. Doctoral Dissertation, Deccan College, Pune.
Osada, Toshiki. 2008. Mundari. In The Munda Languages, ed. Gregory D. S. Anderson, 99–164. New York: Routledge.
Ring, Hiram. Forthcoming. Khasic: Pnar. In Handbook of the Austroasiatic languages, ed. Matthias Jenny and Paul Sidwell, Chapter B: 21, ~30p. Brill. 

At the Himalayan Languages Symposium last week I gave a talk about deixis. This grammatical feature is essentially 'pointing', and words or morphemes in language can point to various things, so grammarians often talk about person or distance-based deixis, social deixis, and temporal deixis.

Distance-based deixis is often encoded in words called 'demonstratives', social deixis in 'honorifics' like "sir", "ma'am" etc.., and temporal deixis is encoded in tense markers. Deixis is actually more complex, though, as deictic morphemes can really point to any point in the communication space, as illustrated in the diagram on the right from Gerner (2009).

Since deixis is such a large topic, my 20-minute talk focused on the way distance-based deixis is encoded in Pnar and in related languages through demonstratives, specifically words that identify the location of nouns in space, relative to a deictic center. Most languages have at least a 2-way contrast (like English "this" and "that"), and rarely more than three. I began to be interested in this feature since in Pnar there is a 5-way contrast in demonstratives and some of the forms resemble similar words in neighboring Tibeto-Burman languages (a completely different language family). Just to illustrate, below on the left are the spatial deictic morphemes in Pnar (the black circle in the middle represents the 'deictic center', which in this case is the person who is speaking), and on the right are the words in some examples of noun phrases in Pnar. You will notice that demonstratives in Pnar are a combination of deictic markers with gender proclitics that identify the noun that the demonstratives are pointing to.

At this point there are a lot of other things I could discuss, but the post is getting a bit long. So I think I'll pause here and my next post will be about the features of demonstratives in neighboring languages. At least now you have a better idea of what deixis is, and how languages can differ significantly in terms of what they can encode in a spatial deictic system.

References
Gerner, Matthias. 2009. Deictic features of demonstratives: a typological survey with special reference to the Miao group. The Canadian Journal of Linguistics/La revue canadienne de linguistique 54:43–90. 

I mentioned that Dr. Anvita Abbi gave a great talk at the Himalayan Languages Symposium on her work on Great Andaman in the Indian Ocean. Here's a map just to show you where that is. [Image credit: Barefoot Holidays]

It's a pretty remote area. In fact, the Nicobar Islands to the south are completely closed to outsiders. When you consider that the speakers of Great Anadaman are down to a single location and the community is switching to Hindi and English as a means of communication, the closed nature of the Nicobar Islands seems somewhat justified. Great Andamanese is actually 10 languages, of which 4 were documented by Dr. Abbi and are spoken by only a handful of speakers. I'll let you check out more about that on this site.

One of the reasons it was fascinating to hear about was because of the highly-developed gender system based on a conceptualization of the world in relation to the human body. Generally, the kind of gender in languages that people are familiar with is that found in Romance languages, where nouns are marked as masculine or feminine, and verbs agree with nouns so that you know which noun is 'controlling' the action (it's more complicated than that of course, but this is just to illustrate a point).

However, gender is simply a noun class system, and nouns can have as many classes as a language (or speakers of a language) find(s) useful. So German has three noun classes (masculine, feminine, neuter), and Bantu languages have a ton (help me out Bantu language experts), and other languages have noun classes based on living things, non-living things, plants, humans, tools, certain kinds of animals, etc..

What is interesting about Great Andamanese is that the same class markers are used on both nouns and verbs in a highly productive way (meaning that they seem to apply in all sorts of ways to both verbs and nouns). These noun class markers identify actions (such as going and coming) as related to one of 7 or so body part prefixes (which also classify nouns) depending on whether the action is conceptualized as relating to mouth (being ingested, digested, etc.. i.e. thinking or being beautiful), or moving in a certain manner (feet), and there are conceptualizations related to all sorts of body parts. Unfortunately I don't have all my notes with me, as I just flew to the US for my brother's wedding, but it's really interesting to think of how this language connects (or doesn't connect) to languages in Southeast Asia and Africa. Read up more on this fascinating system here, and check out Dr. Abbi's new grammar of Great Andamanese, recently published by Brill.