Abstract
The article presents a semantic analysis of five local suffixes in the Indo-Aryan language Kalasha (north-west Pakistan): the three locative suffixes -a, -una and -ai and the two ablative suffixes -ani and -aw. It is shown that these suffixes have both spatial and non-spatial functions. In their basic semantics, the five local suffixes differentiate between point-like location, location on a surface and location in a container. In their non-spatial functions they encode in a systematic way differences with respect to dispersion, visibility and referentiality. It is argued that the five local suffixes constitute a closed-set inflectional case paradigm. As a supplementing areal-typological perspective, non-spatial semantics of case markers in neighbouring Hindu Kush languages is included in the analysis.
About the author
Jan Heegård has worked on the phonology and grammar of Kalasha since 1997 and he obtained his PhD on his work on local case-marking in Kalasha. He is currently Associate Professor at the National Research Centre for Language Change in Real Time (LANCHART), University of Copenhagen, where he is working on Danish as an immigrant language in USA and Argentina.
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
