Wednesday, December 05, 2012

Les déictiques en berbère oriental

Thanks to some filming at a recent conference, you can now listen to me butcher the French language while discussing the demonstrative systems of eastern Berber, in particular Siwi: Les déictiques en berbère oriental. It's not just Berber studies, although it has a good deal of Berber data. You see, it turns out that Siwi, like Qur'anic Arabic, has a typologically unusual feature called addressee agreement; so I attempt here to place this phenomenon within a wider typology of allocutivity, a phenomenon found in languages like Basque and Maithili too.

1 comment:

PhoeniX said...

I always have an easier time understanding the French of people who are 'butchering' the language than those that speak it fluently. Haha.

Interesting talk.

Not sure if I've mentioned this before, but I had a look at the -k form of the deictics in Aujila, and checked if in the texts there is any case where it couldn't be a medial. And there's no such cases. That's not very good evidence that it is a medial, and even if it is, something different is clearly going on, since the -k also shows up in the plural... but still, who knows, maybe there is addressee agreement.

Only one way to find out!