Manner demonstratives in Barayin (Chadic)

This study examines the primary functions of a manner demonstrative teyi in a 28,000-word corpus of Barayin—a Chadic language spoken by 6,000 people in the Guera region of Chad (Lovestrand 2012). Nikitina & Treis (2020) define manner demonstratives as “deictic expressions that identify a way of carrying out an event or the extent to which a property holds”. The manner demonstrative teyi ‘like this’ occurs 295 times in the Barayin corpus. In its core function, teyi refers to a manner or property that is in the immediate (discourse) context or indicated by gesture. The function of the manner demonstrative in Barayin differs from Wan and Kambaata in that manner demonstratives in Barayin are not regularly used in cataphoric reference to reported speech. Rather, the adnominal demonstrative gi is used. Manner demonstratives in Barayin frequently have other extended uses such as an “approximate use” (König 2017) adding vagueness, e.g. ‘or so’. Syntactically, manner demonstratives in Barayin have a similar distribution to adverbs, as in Kambaata. Nikitina & Treis hypothesize that syntactic properties can partially predict meaning extension of manner demonstratives, and the properties of manner demonstratives in Barayin support their hypothesis since the extended uses of Barayin manner demonstratives partially overlap with the uses of manner demonstratives in Kambaata (adverb), but not Wan (sentence-final marker). 

[originally presented at the DIU conference, DIAL, October 12, 2020, and redone for recording on November 16, 2020]

König, Ekkehard. 2017. The deictic identification of similarity. In Yvonne Treis & Martine Vanhove (eds.), Similative and Equative Constructions: A cross-linguistic perspective, 143–164. John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Lovestrand, Joseph. 2012. The linguistic structure of Baraïn (Chadic). Dallas, TX: Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics MA thesis.

Nikitina, Tatiana & Yvonne Treis. 2020. The use of manner demonstratives in discourse: A contrastive study of Wan (Mande) and Kambaata (Cushitic). In Åshild Næss, Anna Margetts & Yvonne Treis (eds.), Demonstratives in discourse (Topics at the Grammar-Discourse Interface). Berlin: Language Science Press.