Obviative Demonstratives in Northern East Cree: Insights from Child-Directed Speech

Abstract

Child-directed speech (CDS) is an important but under-documented genre within the Indigenous languages of the Americas, and recent work has argued that the documentation of CDS can also provide valuable material for linguistic description. This article analyzes more than 25 hours of video-recorded CDS in Iiyiyiuyimuwin (Northern East Cree) to enrich and expand the analysis of the morphosyntax of obviation, a characteristic feature of Algonquian languages. The article elucidates under-described properties of demonstratives, particularly in possessive constructions, to show the crucial roles that obviative demonstratives can play in disambiguating syntax and marking grammatical information not encoded by co-occurring nouns and verbs. Additionally, it explores some morphosyntactic conditions behind under-described variation in obviative forms within the expansive demonstrative paradigm. The usage of particular obviative variants seems tied not to grammatical features such as distance, animacy, or number but instead to whether demonstratives serve pronominal, adnominal, or equational functions.