Social Deictics in the Arsi-Bale Dialect of Oromo

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to investigate and describe the forms and functions of social deictics in Arsi-Bale dialect of Oromo^[3] which is spoken in the southeastern part of Ethiopia. Social deictics are the means to encode verbal pointing in a speech event taking into account the relationship or social status between a speaker, an addressee, and a non-participant. The study is a qualitative one for which data were collected through note-taking of free language use, elicitation and introspection. The findings show that social deictics in the dialect are encoded lexically and grammatically. While relational kinship terms (e.g., ʔabba: ‘father/dad’), expressions signalling social status (e.g. ʃeːka ‘sheikh’) and personal names are used for lexical encoding, plural personal pronouns and the corresponding agreement marking on predicate verbs are used for grammatical encoding. Among some speakers of the dialect, reference to certain phenomena which are considered sacred (water, fire, grass, etc.)  is encoded with the third person plural agreement marking of the predicate verb.  

 [Keywords: absolute, honorific, kinship term, relational, social deictic]