The Bantu-Salish connection in determiner semantics

Abstract

This paper provides a semantic analysis of the D(eterminer)-system in Nata (Eastern Bantu), and compares it with the strikingly similar D-system of St’át’imcets (Salish). Our core proposal is that in both languages, the major distinction encoded by Ds correlates with the presence vs. absence of speaker commitment to the existence of a referent for the noun phrase.We show that neither Nata nor St’át’imcets Ds encode well-known distinctions like definiteness or specificity. Instead, they reflect the speaker’s (un)willingness to commit to the existence of a referent for the DP. Despite these parallels, the two D-systems are not identical. In St’át’imcets, the notion of existence is based on the speaker’s personal knowledge; in Nata, the existence Ds are also used for entities which are surmised to exist, or are future possibilities. We derive the difference between ‘knowledge of existence’ and ‘belief of existence’ from independent differences in the evidential systems of the two languages. This work contributes to the landscape of potential determiner meanings across languages.