Discourse-structuring functions of Abui demonstratives

In a number of East and South-East Asian languages, certain grammatical elements such as pronouns, generic nouns, or demonstratives (e.g. one, thing, this) have acquired additional pragmatic functions. Well-documented examples of this grammaticalization process are the Mandarin de, the Malay punya/nya/mia and the Japanese no (cf. Yap, Matthews et al. 2004); the grammaticalized element occurs in the sentence-final position encoding speaker’s certainty about the proposition. A similar development has taken place in Abui (a Papuan language of Eastern Indonesia); markers describing speaker’s attitude towards a proposition (evidentiality and assertion) are recruited from two sources: (i) demonstratives and (ii) the utterance verb ba ‘say’.