Carol Genetti, Ph.D. - Pointing the Way with Tibeto-Burman Deictic

Book chapter

Carol Genetti
In Press. In Hildebrandt Kristine, David Peterson, Yankee Modi, Hiroyuki Suzuki (eds.)., The Handbook of Tibeto-Burman Languages [OUP Handbooks in Linguistics].

Cite

APA Click to copy
Genetti, C. Pointing the Way with Tibeto-Burman Deictic Expressions. In K. In Press. In Hildebrandt, D. Peterson, Y. Modi, & H. S. (eds.). (Eds.), The Handbook of Tibeto-Burman Languages [OUP Handbooks in Linguistics].

Chicago/Turabian Click to copy
Genetti, Carol. “Pointing the Way with Tibeto-Burman Deictic Expressions.” In The Handbook of Tibeto-Burman Languages [OUP Handbooks in Linguistics]., edited by Kristine In Press. In Hildebrandt, David Peterson, Yankee Modi, and Hiroyuki Suzuki (eds.)., n.d.

MLA Click to copy
Genetti, Carol. “Pointing the Way with Tibeto-Burman Deictic Expressions.” The Handbook of Tibeto-Burman Languages [OUP Handbooks in Linguistics]., edited by Kristine In Press. In Hildebrandt et al.

BibTeX Click to copy

@inbook{carol-a,
  title = {Pointing the Way with Tibeto-Burman Deictic Expressions},
  author = {Genetti, Carol},
  editor = {In Press. In Hildebrandt, Kristine and Peterson, David and Modi, Yankee and (eds.)., Hiroyuki Suzuki},
  booktitle = {The Handbook of Tibeto-Burman Languages [OUP Handbooks in Linguistics].}
}

ABSTRACT

Deictic expressions are linguistic elements whose interpretation makes reference to extralinguistic properties of the utterance in which they occur (Anderson and Keenan 1985:259). As such, deixis is one of the core design principles of language, allowing abstract meanings to be grounded in the real (or imagined) world, thus making an utterance relevant to the speech participants. There are four primary types of deixis: personal, spatial, temporal, and social, to which could be added the minor types, such as discourse, dimension, amount, and manner deixis. In Tibeto-Burman, deictic expressions can be found across the clause, not only in a wide variety of word classes (especially pronouns, demonstratives, adpositions, nouns, verbs, and adverbs), but also in paradigmatic subsystems of grammatical morphemes. Some of these subsystems are remarkably complex, allowing for fine-grained delineation of contextual meanings. An exhaustive review of Tibeto-Burman deixis is beyond the scope of the current chapter, which instead provides a representative sample of the types of deictic systems attested across the Tibeto-Burman family. The chapter concludes with a summary and directions for future research.