Anaphora represents an important grammatical feature with much theoretical and empirical value. Its forms and functions vary greatly cross-linguistically, and many frameworks have been proposed to analyze and predict what anaphoric forms are avail- able given a language’s other features. In this thesis, I focus on anaphoric expressions in A’ingae, an underdocumented and endangered language isolate in the Amazonian Ecuador and Columbia, and I approach this study of anaphora through both descriptive and analytical perspectives. I primarily investigate the nominal anaphor ‘tsa’, the locative anaphor ‘tse’, and the verbal anaphor ‘tsun’. ‘Tsa’ is used both pronominally and adnominally in anaphoric definite noun phrases where there is a clear antecedent in previous discourse, and ‘tsa’ is not felicitous in indefinite, unique definite, or deictic noun phrases. ‘Tse’ occurs in many seemingly morphologically complex phrases – ‘tseni’, ‘tse’thi‘, ‘tse’i‘, ‘tseite‘, ‘tse’sû‘, and ‘tsendekhû‘ – but only some of these are actually morphologically decomposable. In particular, only the ‘tse’ adverbs can be decomposed into the locative anaphor ‘tse’ plus some additional clitics, where ‘tse’ in these adverbs refers to a time or location from previous discourse. The non-adverbs are fossilized forms and not decomposable syn- chronically: ‘tse’sû’ refers to property of individuals, and ‘tsendekhû’ is a third-person plural pronoun that refers to individuals. For the verbal anaphor ‘tsun’, it is primarily used in verbal ellipses anaphorically referring to some verbal phrase, although it does have uses that more resemble a lexical ‘do’. The theoretical contribution from the description of all of ‘tsa‘, ‘tse‘, and ‘tsun’ is based on their shared dedicated anaphoricity. These ‘ts’ expressions in A’ingae show a strict split between these anaphoric demonstratives and the exophoric demonstratives in the language (‘va’ and ‘juva‘). Much of current literature on analysis of demonstratives has proposed somewhat unifying analyses of all of exophoric and non-exophoric demonstratives, and I argue that this unification should be amended in light of the em- pirical pattern in A’ingae ‘ts’ expressions. Specific to the nominal anaphor ‘tsa’, I also analyze the structure of (in)definiteness in A’ingae in the context of previous proposals on predicting the definite forms in a language based on pragmatic competition. I argue that pragmatically based proposals fail to predict the pattern in A’ingae and several other languages described in recent literature, and I propose an alternative semantically based analysis for A’ingae definiteness structure.
Zheng, Holly,
"Anaphoric Expressions in A'ingae"
(2022).
Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/1y0z-3t93
