1 DEIXIS AND GRAMMAR IN MARORI I WAYAN ARKA Australian National University/Universitas Udayana wayan.arka@anu.edu.au Paper presented at the Workshop on ‘Deixis and Spatial Expressions in Indonesian Languages’ 22-23 July, Osaka-Japan Abstract This paper provides the first description of deixis in Marori (language isolate, Papuan, Merauke-Indonesia, highly endangered). It discusses how the deictic system is tied to the larger system in the grammar. It highlights the significance of the deictic data with respect to syntactic theory and typology of agreement and feature structures. 1 Introduction * This paper discusses the intricacies and significance of the deictic system in Marori 1 It will be demonstrated that Marori shows a quite complex deictic system. Temporal and spatial deixis is intertwined as part of the grammar, encoded across lexical as well as functional categories (pronouns, verbs, demonstratives, locative nominals, and relativisers). At the heart of the formal coding of deixis is the verbal system structured around paradigm classes where tense-aspect-mood (TAM) and number constraints are imposed by the grammatical-semantic agreement system of the language. Complexities arise due to the fact that there is no one-to-one relationship between formal paradigm classes and the deictic spatio-temporal anchoring. Marori data poses a descriptive challenge (i.e., providing an accurate description of the properties of the complex deictic system including its uses) as well a theoretical-typological challenge (i.e., providing an explicit analysis of the interface , a language isolate from Trans New Guinea, Papua (Ross 2005). * Research reported in this paper was supported by a small grant from CAP, ANU (2010) and an ARC Discovery Grant DP 110100307 (2011-2015). Special thanks must go to Verman Singerin (my research assistant in Merauke, who accompanied me to spend the nights in the field) and to my Marori consultants (Bapak Paskalis Kaize, Esebyus Basik-basik, Bapak Amandanus, Mama Veronika, and Bapak Willem Gebze) for their hospitality and help with the data and the transcriptions. This paper is the first description of deixis in Marori. The documentation and research on Marori is still in progress. The analysis outlined in this paper, therefore, should be taken as preliminary and tentative. 1 Alternative names are Morori, Moaraeri, Moraori, and Morari.