A semantic sketch of spatial grams in Garifuna.

摘要

Garifuna is a language spoken in Central America and is also known as Black Carib or Island Carib, from the Arawakan language family. Garifuna has had contact with French, Spanish, English, and other native Caribbean languages throughout its lifetime. Spatial grams in Garifuna are of particular interest because they have not been extensively studied. This thesis will give a semantic sketch of the eight monomorphemic spatial grams whose primary uses are for spatial relations. These include the prepositions -ida 'in,' -uwagu 'on,' -ubadu 'near,' -wei 'from', and - un 'to' and the suffixes -rugu 'at/in,' -un 'to,' and -gien/gian 'from.' The study of spatial grams is an important subfield of linguistic semantics, and this thesis discusses the semantics of these spatial grams following a framework of cognitive linguistics and with regard to current theories in grammaticalization.