Aspects of deixis in Cicipu: evidence from real-time video commentary

This article is concerned with spatial deixis in Cicipu, a Benue-Congo language of Nigeria, focusing on the demonstrative adverbs. The five-term system is in itself unusual cross-linguistically, but it is also of interest because of the use of two of the five demonstratives in the system of verb aspect. The distal term 'ũ̂ and the near-hearer term lêe both form periphrastic constructions with the verb, resulting in aspectual categories that may be glossed as ‘perfect’ and ‘completive’ respectively. The primary aim of this article is a descriptive one: to present the system of spatial deixis as encoded in the demonstrative adverbs, and to provide evidence in support of the characterisation of the two verbal constructions. The second part of the article is more relevant to documentary linguistics since it concerns the documentary corpus which was used as the basis for this study, and in particular the important role that the genre of real-time video commentary played in arriving at the analysis presented here. The discussion of the completive hinges on its distribution in video commentary, in particular the way in which it coincides with the completion of the most salient events of the festival. Language Documentation and Description, Vol. 9 (2011)