Determination and definiteness in Pilagá

VIDAL, ALEJANDRA

Conferencia; Linguistisches Kolloquium SS22 Chair of General and Comparative Linguistics; 2022

Universität Regensburg

Payne and Vidal (2020) identified different constructions and functions, i.e., demonstrative roots which have deictic, pointing-out, or joint-attention functions; demonstrative construction (dem), a word-level construction that contains a deictic or joint-attention establishing root other than just a classifier.; determiner (det), any classifier or demonstrative construction when functioning adnominally . Assuming these categories for the grammar of Pilagá, I examine the referential function played by these forms, CITAR based on a text-corpus collected in Formosa, Argentina. The digital corpus of Pilagá texts is publicly accessible online at the ALLA Archive.Nearly all nouns require a determiner, so they are ubiquitous in discourse. Pilagá determiners include forms that also function demonstratively, pronominally, adverbially (Vidal 2001, Payne and Vidal 2020). Some determiners are simple, involving only what we call classifiers (CLF); others are demonstrative word-level constructions. We aim to explore the use of demonstratives vis-à-vis simple classifier constructions in referring to entities in narrative discourse, and the semantic, syntactic, and information structural properties that contribute to bringing such entities into attention, and thus making them accessible to reference. Pilagá is an endangered South American Indian language of the Guaycuruan family spoken by 4000 people in the Gran Chaco. It is a head-marking language on the clause level, there is no case or gender on nominals.This impact on the referential systems that some grammatical systems may have and hence, the need to restructure discourse according to the speaker´s intention to indicate familiarity or nor with respect to certain referents, have been addressed in the literature (Fryzigner 2018; Helmbrecht 2021, 2022. In this line of research , we situate the discussion about obligatory marking of arguments on the verb and the the reintroduction of referents after the first mention in Pilagá. We will show that speakers have resources to compensate for this lack of definite articles.