When it comes to spatial deixis most languages seem to have either two or three distinctions:
2 | 3
English | Spanish Japanese
--------------------------------
here | aquí / acá koko
there | ahí soko
(yonder) | allá / allí asoko
Are there any languages with distinctions other than these?
The Malagasy language for example, national language of Madagascar, has a complex system of deixis with seven degrees of distance. Here's the tab taken from the Deixis section:
Notes: (1) Diacritics in deixis are not mandatory in Malagasy; (2) Deixis marked by a * are rarely used.
About the Malagasy deixis, you could read "The Austronesian languages of Asia and Madagascar" by K. Alexander Adelaar and Nikolaus Himmelmann (see page 470).
It seems that also the Dyirbal language (Australian family; North Queensland) has 15 suffixes that attach to demonstratives or to the noun classifiers, using a system that takes into consideration:
Unfortunately I couldn't find anything schematic about this one yet. But you can find more about it and others in this page.
Tlingit has a four-way system of deixis in its demonstratives (which are more like determiners because they cannot encode entities when used alone).
yá — proximal: near speaker, usually within reach
hé — mesioproximal: near speaker but usually closer to listener than speaker
wé — mesiodistal: near listener and out of reach of speaker, or out of reach of both listener and speaker but still easily reachable
yú — distal: distant, well beyond the reach of either listener or speaker
To demonstrate:
yá ax̱ jín ‘this, my hand’ (speaker gestures to own hand)
hé i káaxweiyí ‘this, your coffee’ (speaker gestures to listener’s coffee cup)
wé x̱ʼaháat ‘that door’ (speaker gestures to door on other side of the room)
yú hít ‘that building’ (speaker gestures to building visible through window)
The most common pair, according to my intuitive experience, are yá and wé parallelling English ‘this’ and ‘that’. Yú is used somewhat less often than wé. Hé is not used as much as the other three because it is often an irrelevant distinction, but it does occur in a number of conventionalized oppositions such as yá ‘right’ vs. hé ‘left’, yá ‘starboard’ vs. hé ‘port’, or yá ‘fore’ vs. hé ‘back’. All Tlingit speakers I have met demonstrate full competency with the entire system despite any frequency issues, and given its understanding by the semi-speakers and relearners I have talked to, it is probably something acquired fairly early in childhood.
I think the speaker could say yá i káaxweiyí only if they touched or were otherwise close to the listener’s coffee cup somehow. If the speaker wanted to differentiate their hands, they could wave their right hand and say yá ax̱ sheeynax̱.aanáx̱ jín and then wave their left hand and say hé ax̱ sʼátnax̱.aanáx̱ jín ‘this my left hand’.
All of these demonstratives can be used for discourse purposes as well, to locate notional things like propositions, utterances, and situations in positions relative to the spatiotemporal centre of the discourse. Thus one can distance oneself from another’s words by saying yú hasdu yoo x̱ʼatángi ‘that (distal) their speech’, or align oneself with another’s words by saying yá hasdu yoo x̱ʼatángi ‘this (proximal) their speech’. The subtle differences between these, and indeed the discursive uses of the deixis system in general, have yet to be explored in any sort of detail.
None of this system really has anything to do with visibility or other forms of evidentiality, as has been described in a lot of deictic ‘complex’ systems. It’s instead strictly deixis, encoding the relative distance from the origo. Also note that it has nothing to do with personal exclusivity, since Tlingit has no encoding of inclusive versus exclusive person.
American Sign Language. Spatial diexis is indicated by what looks like a pointing gesture, (When discussing physically present referents,one just points at them.) for which there is a potentially infinite number of distinctions.
Basic info: Pronouns in ASL (.doc download)
Details: The effect of number marking on the use of space in ASL
According to John McWhorter, there is a language called Muna (spoken in the Indonesian island of Sulawesi), in which the system of spatial deixis works like this:
The word ini means 'this here,' itu means “that there,” maitu means “that near him,” watu means “that over there by him,” tatu means “that up there,” and nagha means “that which we can hear but not see”.
Inuktitut is also a language with deixis encoding things such as visible/nonvisible and "up there" as opposed to simply "there, over there".
(
quassù (up here), quaggiù (down here), lassù (up there), laggiù (down there).
Spanish (at least in Mexico) distinguishes two different deixis factors. I'll show it phonemically instead of orthographically:
near listener far from listener
near speaker aki aka
far from speaker aji aja
So if I'm talking to you about something that's here in the same room as us, I'd say it's aki. It's here where both of us are.
If I'm inviting you to come across the room to sit over here by me, I'd invite you to come aka. This emphasizes that it's over here by me, not "here" where we both are.
If I'm talking about something over near you, I'd say it's aji.
If I'm pointing at something far off, something far from both of us, I'd say it's aja.
Sinhala, one of the languages spoken in Sri Lanka has a four way deixis system. written phonemically - me = this/these, near the speaker oye = that/those, near the listener are = (distal) visible but far from both speaker and listener e = (distal) not visible to either Jim Gair has written extensively about it. This is an online document I found about it
For Kwakw'ala (Kwakiutl) Boas 1947 grammar describes as deictic system of 3 degrees combined with a distinction visible/invisible
Pronominal demonstratives
Close to 1st person visible -k invisible -gaʔ
Close to 2nd person visible -ux invisible -uʔ
Away from 1/2nd pers visible -iq invisible -iʔ
The visibility distinction may be a typical feature of Nothern Wakashan languages in general (cf Emmon Bach (2006) Paradigm regained: Deixis in Northern Wakashan, SOAS Working Papers in Linguistcs Vol 14:267-281
Some languages like Japanese have spatial deixis words that refer to both the speaker and the listener. Sometimes analyzed as proximal, medial and distant, it's more often analyzed as "close to me, the speaker", "close to you, the listener" and "far from the two of us."
Kiranti Languages are known to exhibit a remarkably unique feature, so-called altitudinal cases. Nouns are always (? I think, it's been a while) marked as being either "above", "below" or "across" (= level). This is tied to both the geographic profile of the region and to the mythological dimensions of verticality.
Portuguese has words sounding like Spanish, but with different meanings:
Cebuano also has three, from the speaker's point of view:
Kini ( ki-ni ) (ni) – this / these
Kana ( ka-na ) (na) – that / those
Kadto ( kad-to ) (to) – that / those over there (far away)
The location deixis in Muna language:
DEIXIS OF LOCATION demonstrative (pronoun/adjective) Aini (this) aitu, amaitu,atatu, awatu(that) Demonstrative (adverbs) We ini (here) we itu, we watu (there)
