Presentative demonstratives in Kambaata
Résumé
The paper focusses on a typologically uncommon system of presentatives in Kambaata, a Cushitic language of Ethiopia. While many European languages have one, at most two grammaticalised presentatives at their disposal – see French voilà / voici, Latin ecce, Italian ecco and Russian vot / von – Kambaata has a paradigm of 12 presentative forms, which are used to point out and call the attention to an entity. These presentatives specify the approximate
location of the presented entity and provide information on the nature of the entity (gender and number). Formally, the Kambaata presentatives are one type of demonstrative, besides attributive and pronominal demonstratives. The structure of my talk is as follows: I will first give a brief overview of the morphologically complex Kambaata 4-degree-system (proximal, medial, contrastive, distal) of attributive and pronominal demonstratives. Then I elaborate on the functional as well as the morphological and syntactic features of presentative demonstratives. The analysis is based on data from recorded speech events, observation and written sources.
Domaines
Linguistique
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