Space and attention in the Kyrgyz demonstrative system

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v10i1.5944

Keywords:

Demonstratives, Exophoric demonstratives , Anchoring, Attention, Turkic, Kyrgyz

Abstract

Based on novel empirical work on the Kyrgyz (Turkic) nine-term demonstrative system, this paper investigates the spatial uses of demonstratives and the relationship between demonstratives' attention-drawing and spatial denotations, which has been a fundamental question for the study of demonstrative semantic content (Skilton 2019, Levinson 2018). While Kyrgyz, similarly to Turkish (Küntay & Özyürek 2002, 2006), appears to have a specialized attention-drawing demonstrative indicating that attention-drawing and spatial denotations can be entirely distinct, careful elicitations reveal that attention drawing is derived from a (joint-attention) sociocentric distal meaning. 

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Published

2025-05-21

Issue

Vol. 10 No. 1 (2025): Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America

Section

Articles

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Copyright (c) 2025 Eszter Ótott-Kovács, Tolgonay Kubatova, Harrison Saunders, Jonathan Washington

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.

How to Cite

Ótott-Kovács, Eszter, Tolgonay Kubatova, Harrison Saunders, and Jonathan Washington. 2025. “Space and Attention in the Kyrgyz Demonstrative System”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 10 (1): 5944. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v10i1.5944.