Pilagá determiners and demonstratives: Discourse use and grammaticalisation

Abstract

Guaykuruan languages of the South American Chaco have rich sets of classifiers and demonstratives, marking deictic, visibility, postural, and recognitional meanings. There is lack of consensus in the Guaykuruan literature about determiner and demonstrative elements, even across closely related dialects. This chapter explores them in Pilagá, including their structure, discourse profile, extension into the tense-evidentiality domain, and grammaticalisation as subordinators. Corpus data show that mʔe is best viewed as ‘distance neutral’, contrasting with hoʔ ‘proximal’ (which also has adverbial uses), tʃaʔa ‘distal visible’, maʕa ‘unseen’, and naqae ‘recognitional’. Mʔe is dominantly endophoric and has grammaticalised as a relativiser. The ‘vertical’ classifying determiner daʔ has grammaticalised as a general subordinator.