Demonstratives in Cross-Linguistic Perspective

Description

Demonstratives play a crucial role in the acquisition and use of language. Bringing together a team of leading scholars this detailed study, a first of its kind, explores meaning and use across fifteen typologically and geographically unrelated languages to find out what cross-linguistic comparisons and generalizations can be made, and how this might challenge current theory in linguistics, psychology, anthropology and philosophy. Using a shared experimental task, rounded out with studies of natural language use, specialists in each of the languages undertook extensive fieldwork for this comparative study of semantics and usage. An introduction summarizes the shared patterns and divergences in meaning and use that emerge.

Stephen C. Levinson is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and Professor of Comparative Linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen. His research focusses on language diversity and its implications for theories of human cognition. He is the author of over 300 publications. Sarah Cutfield is Visiting Fellow, Linguistics at the Australian National University. Her specialties are descriptive and typological linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, language documentation, Australian Aboriginal languages, creole languages, language ideology and identity. Michael J. Dunn is Professor of General Linguistics at Uppsala Universitet, Sweden since 2014. His academic background is in language description, linguistic typology, and phylogenetics, and his current research focus is on the evolutionary dynamics of language change. N. J. Enfield is Professor of Linguistics at The University of Sydney. He is head of a Research Excellence Initiative on The Crisis of Post-Truth Discourse. His research on language, culture, cognition and social life is based on long term field work in mainland Southeast Asia, especially Laos. Sergio Meira is a researcher at Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi, Belem. He specializes in the Cariban and Tupian language families of lowland South America and in the Tiriyo language in particular.

'Reporting on demonstratives in fifteen nearly all unrelated and 'exotic' languages, each language is studied with an identical, interactive elicitation technique, resulting in very detail language-specific descriptions as well as a typological sketch of the key parameters of variation. Even if readers already know that there is much more to this, that and the other than a proximal verus distal distinction, this book is a must.' Johan van der Auwera, Universiteit Antwerpen