Demonstrative Choice in Secoya and Implications for Tukanoan Linguistics

The present study provides a detailed account of spatial demonstratives in Secoya (Tukanoan) with special attention to the factors influencing demonstrative selection language use. Secoya, like other Western Tukanoan languages, has a tripartite system, different from Eastern Tukanoan languages, which have a binary system. Regarding the semantic content of the demonstratives, data from a corpus and from an elicitation task reveal that Secoya exhibits features of person-oriented systems (Anderson and Keenan 1985), insofar as the selection of the items seems sensitive not only to the distance between referent and speaker, but also to the distance between referent and addressee, as well as to the space between speaker and addressee. These results challenge the supremacy of the speaker as the only deictic point in the selection of demonstratives, as has been reported for most languages of the family.