Avaliação: Determination and definiteness in the languages of the Americas/Determinación y definitud en las lenguas de América – The expression of definiteness in Hup

The Hup language is one of the four Naduhup languages spoken by the Hupda people at the border of the Brazilian state of Amazonia and Columbia. Hup possesses many different referential expressions such as proper names, personal pronouns (no gender), and demonstratives. However, Hup has no definite articles. The main questions of our contribution are: a) are there alternative ways to indicate the definiteness or indefiniteness of nominal referents, or is definiteness not marked at all? and b) how the above listed different referential expressions are employed in order to indicate directly, or indirectly the definiteness/ indefiniteness of a referent. “Indirect” means that we will examine the possibility that the definiteness of a referent may not be marked directly but has secondary formal effects besides the choice of one of the referential expression types. In order to answer the question, we will review the examples and explanations given in Epps (2008) and we will conduct a corpus study using the Hup texts made available in the AILLA archive at the University of Texas by Patience Epps (Epps n.d.).

References
Epps, Patience. 2008. A grammar of Hup. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Epps, Patience. n.d. Hup Collection of Patience Epps. The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America AILLA (ailla.utexas.org. Access: public. PID ailla: 119685. Accessed February 28 2023).

• definiteness
• reference
• demonstratives
• pronouns
• Hup language