Author(s) :

Moges Yigezu.

Volume/Issue :

Abstract :

The current study aims to describe the spatial deictic system of the Hamar language and contribute to the limited linguistic literature on the language. Deictic expressions are linguistic elements with built-in contextual parameters and are traditionally classified into three semantic categories: person, spatial, and temporal (Levinson, 1983). Spatial deictic, the focus of this study, refers to objects, locations, or persons relative to the speaker or addressee during the speech act. The core of spatial deictic constitutes a small class of expressions, such as demonstratives and locational adverbs. Hamar follows a distance-oriented system, and spatial deictics indicate four locations on a distance scale relative to the speaker’s location in the speech event. These are: proximal, medial, first-degree distal, and second-degree distal. All deictic words are formed from the deictic root -k-; the deictic stem consists of the deictic root and other morphemes. Spatial deictic elements inflect for gender, number, and case and function as modifiers of nouns. When marked for case, they can function as the head of a noun phrase. Syntactically, demonstratives in Hamar can be classified as nominal demonstratives and adverbial demonstratives. Adverbial demonstratives are deictically contrastive and make a three-way distinction between proximal, medial, and distal. Moreover, demonstratives in Hamar encode other planes of spatial orientations such as visibility, elevation, geography, and movement. Four degrees of elevation (that also combine visibility) have been recognized in the vertical dimension. In the horizontal dimension, two levels of distance are identified in the front-back axis, and three levels of distance in the left-right axis. The spatial deictic elements can also serve as temporal and anaphoric expressions. This study further discusses the source models for deictic expressions, including body-part nomenclature as metaphor and environmental landmarks as spatial deictic expressions.

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