Some Thoughts on Demonstrative and Locative Nā

Abstract

This article argues why two uses of nā (preposed demonstrative nā [= kēnā] and postposed deictic/locative nā) have disappeared from Hawaiian. Following a brief discussion of their historical use with a few examples, including the only attested examples of postposed locative nā in Hawaiian literature, the author proposes that the reason for their disappearance was the merging of the phonemes /ŋ/ (written as ng in Māori and g in Samoan) and /n/, so that *ngā and nā both came to be realized as nā. Because the preposed demonstrative nā frequently occupied the same syntactic space as the plural default determiner, both the demonstrative and the semantically related locative use of postposed nā fell out of use.