Demonstratives in ?ay?aǰuθəm: Managing joint attention through gesture and salience

Abstract

In this paper, we provide the first detailed description and analysis of the demonstrative system in ?ay?aǰuθəm (a.k.a. Comox-Sliammon; ISO 639-3: coo), a Coast Salish language spoken in British Columbia, Canada. Drawing from original fieldwork with five speakers, we show that the demonstratives in ?ay?aǰuθəm not only encode deictic distance, evidentiality, gender, and number, but also whether or not joint attention (cf. Diessel, 2006) has been established between the speech participants. The gesture demonstratives rely on the use of co-speech gesture to establish joint attention, while the salience demonstratives are used where joint attention is already established and, consequently, do not require gesture. To analyze the former, we incorporate gesture into the semantic analysis as the means of identifying the referent (following Ebert, Ebert and Hörnig, 2020). We analyze the latter as relying on contextual salience to establish reference (inspired by Roberts, 2002; Schwarz, 2009). In more provisional terms, we also present less common uses of demonstratives, where gesture is used to refer to manners, qualities, or degrees (cf. König & Umbach, 2018). This research adds to the growing body of super-semantic literature which argues that the contribution of gesture belongs within the compositional semantics, indicating that certain demonstrative forms may even require gesture to establish reference.