Determiners and Demonstratives
See Questions for the section on "which" interrogatives (used in WH-constituent questions), which agree for noun class with the head noun in their phrase.
Determiners are post-nominal and appear as clitics or words rather than as suffixes. A reason for not treating them as suffixes is that when nouns are modified, the modifying constituent intervenes between the noun and the determiner. Futehrmore, the determiner agrees with the noun class. It also has word properties and is able to be positioned phrase-initially as well as undergoes morphophonological agreement changes, and encodes proximal-distal distinctions.
Determiners undergo a four-way proximity distinction, as the following table summarizes:
(I understand that final -e is optional for all proximal and medial ones. -a is not optional but mandatory for the distals).
The first column consists of a consonant (C), which is defined according to the noun class of the verb it is combining with, but the vowel and coda of that syllable expone the unique semantic features of the determiner, that is, whether it is a proximal, medial or distal, or not visible distal. The coda consonants of these clitics expone proximity as follows: -k- is proximal, -n- is distal and medial, and -g- is super-distal. In terms of vowel distinction, -ee- is associated with proximal and medial, and -aa- with distal in general.
