DEICTICS IN AMHARIC

This paper is an attempt made to fill in gaps in the morphosyntax of Amharic deictics. It makes a thorough description of the inflections of personal, spatial and locative deictics at root and stem levels. At the root level, deictics show affixes for the nominal features of person, gender or number and at the stem level, they show inflections for such adnominal features as dimension, exclusive and presentative reference of objects in space and / or discourse. The affixes of the nominal features at the root level are obligatory whereas those affixes at the stem level are optional and that both types of affixes follow the same pattern of affix ordering where the affixes of the adnominal features of the stem follow the affixes of nominal features of the root. Both the roots and their extended stems take noun phrases as their complements and the heads of such complements may remain null or undergo ellipses as their content is recoverable from the forms of the agreement affixes or from the context of a running discourse.