Crossroads, watchposts and isoglosses: sighting of Altaic ostension
(64th Meeting Budapest, 2022)
This talk will offer preliminary data on ostensive markers — a rather neglected research field in Altaic studies. Ostensive predicators, also referred to in the linguistic literature as ‘presentative particles’, are “grammatical expressions whose combination with a noun phrase constitutes the core of clauses aiming to draw the attention of the addressee to the presence of some entity within the situation of discourse” (Creissels 2017: 47); examples thereof include French voici/voilà, Italian ecco, Latin ecce and Russian vot.
References
Creissels, D. 2017. Copulas originating from the imperative of ‘see/look’ verbs in Mande languages. In: Bisang, W. & Malchukov, A. (eds) Unity and diversity in grammaticalization scenarios. Berlin: Language Science Press. 45–66
Kuteva, T., Heine, B., Hong, B., Long, H. & Narrog, H. & Rhee, S. 2019. World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kindle-Version. [Second, extensively revised and updated edition]