From elevation to identifiability: Topography as discourse-cognitive signposting

Abstract

Spatial communication has been at the forefront of recent research in the linguistic, anthropological and cognitive sciences. Independently, a great deal of attention has been devoted to linguistic resources, including spatial language, deployed to structure and organise discourse and conversation. Demonstrative systems are relevant to both lines of enquiry because they can express spatial meanings to locate referents in the real-world (aka exophoric uses) whilst at the same time exhibiting discourse-structuring functions that help speakers and hearers keep track of what has been said (aka endophoric uses). Situated at the intersection between both paradigms, the present article presents novel empirical data on Phola geophysical deixis with a twofold focus. After providing extensive multimodal evidence that Phola demonstratives encode elevation contrasts in a polysemous and pragmatically flexible manner, the discussion turns to their discourse-structuring functions, which are typologically rare. In particular, ke⁵⁵ ‘that down(hill)’ is found to exhibit article-like uses indexing referents that are already identified, that are easy to identify, or whose exophoric identity is irrelevant. Both the spatial underspecification of Phola geophysical demonstratives and their discourse–interactional properties shed new light on the interplay between exophoric and endophoric uses and the fluidity between spatial cognition and more abstract cognitive processes.