Evidential Determiners in Nivaĉle

Determiners and the Development of Grammatical Nominalization in Nivaĉle*

“…Varying somewhat by language, these determiners code fine visibility, proximity to a deictic center, and existence distinctions like ‘never seen’, ‘seen before but not now’, ‘currently seen+proximate to the point of reference’, ‘currently seen+distal from the point of reference’; they can also mark number, gender, and humanness (Seelwische 1975, Stell 1987, Gerzenstein 1994, Carol 2011, Messineo et al. 2011, Nercesian 2014, Fabre 2016, Gutiérrez 2015b). The relevance of the determiners in these other languages to hypotheses about the bracketed structures in (2) and (3) will be seen in Section 5.…”

“…These are phonological clitics (represented by ‘=’), though some published sources and the practical orthography write them as separate words. The forms are semantically quite complex, so in examples we gloss na= as d 1, xa= as d 2, ka= as d 3, and pa= as d 4 and refer the reader to the intersections of parameters in Table 1 for more complete meanings (see also Gutiérrez 2015b).…”

“…If an inanimate referent is indexed by ka= , it is interpreted as ‘no‐longer in existence’, as in (1) above. According to Gutiérrez (2015b:418), there is often an implication that the referent introduced by ka= is not present at the utterance time. However, this implication is not obligatory; an entity may be present (but dead) at the utterance time (e.g.…”

Multifunctionality of the verbal suffix -ʧɁe ~ -kɁe and analepsis in Nivaĉle (Mataguayo family, Gran Chaco region)

“…Maká has the smallest number of speakers (around 1.500). 4 Gutiérrez (2015b) prefers to treat those particles as evidential determiners. For deictic classifiers in general, see Aikhenvald (2000: 176-181), where the author provides examples from neighbouring Guaykurú languages.…”

“…About the intriguing similarities and differences between the Guaykurú and Mataguayo deictic systems, see Messineo;Carol & Klein (2016) and Vidal & Gutiérrez (2010). Gutiérrez (2015b) analyses the sixteen evidential determiners of Nivaĉle. From these basic building blocks, further categories like third person pronouns, demonstratives, anaphoric, differential, relatives, indefinite, presentatives, and even some question words can be built.…”