Indexed definiteness without demonstratives in Guébie
Badiba Olivier Agodio, Peter Jenks, Hannah Sande, Malte Zimmermann
December 2023
 

In this article we describe the semantic distribution of the Guébie definite enclitic =a, which occurs in a subset of unique definite contexts as well as in anaphoric contexts. We further show that Guébie completely lacks an exophoric demonstrative, the only known counterexample to the proposed universal that every language has demonstratives. We analyze =a as an indexed unique definite, a novel category of definiteness, and bare nouns as inherently indefinite. The Guébie facts suggest that while demonstratives are not universal, indexed definiteness is.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/008259
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Proceedings of TripleA 10
keywords: definiteness, indexed definiteness, demonstratives, guébie, semantics
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