A Brief Report on the Demonstrative System of Hnaring Lutuv

Abstract

Demonstratives are a class of grammatical morphemes which perform several roles related to deixis and information structure. Investigations of demonstratives have looked at their morphosyntactic structure and their semantic functions. This paper looks at the demonstrative system of Lutuv, a Kuki-Chin language of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Notable features of the Lutuv demonstrative system include a circumnominal demonstrative phrase structure, which contain a prenominal generic demonstrative and a postnominal deixis-containing segment. This structure is analyzed in basic noun phrases, alongside adjectives and number, and in phrases with different case marking. This report briefly touches upon grammaticality and ungrammaticality observed when the postnominal structure of ma-NP-D is broken or rearranged. As a preliminary report, this paper offers several questions for future research of the Lutuv demonstrative system.