Deixis in Kusunda

This paper examines the different categories of demonstrative deixis in Kusunda, a language isolate of western Nepal. Our corpus, based on naturalistic data evidences a much wider range of contrasts than is attested in earlier, elicitation based work. We show that while there is no evidence for any linguistic encoding of the relative directions left and right, nor of the absolute directions north-south-east-west, the spatial deictics are rich in differentiation of the vertical dimension, with both absolute height and relative height encoded, and elaborated on in complex constructions; some locative terms are also used for temporal reference. Unusually, the proximal range is more highly elaborated than the distal range, though the distal categories show overlap into the pronominal system.