Demonstratives and the expression of definiteness in Tapiete (Tupi-Guarani)

Abstract

Tapiete is a Southern Tupi-Guarani language spoken by about 2,800 people in the region of the Western Gran Chaco, in Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay, South America. Like other languages in this linguistic family, Tapiete does not show definite or indefinite articles. Speakers express different degrees of definiteness using other grammar resources such as bare nouns, demonstratives, numerals, and an alienable/inalienable possession system. The aim of this article is to provide an initial study of definiteness in Tapiete based on the analysis of semantic and pragmatic functions of demonstratives in contrast with other definiteness strategies available in the language. The research is based on representative oral textual data collected from long-term field work. In Tapiete, bare nouns and nouns from the inalienably possessed group express mostly unique or weak definite values while adnominal demonstratives signal strong definite referents by way of anaphoric and exophoric referential relations. Demonstratives are very productive for marking discourse topics and indexing speech event facts (spatial and time deixis, speech participants, discourse genre), as well as identifying and reintroducing a referent within discourse.