LAUSR

Abstract This paper offers a non-spatial procedural account of demonstratives in Yurakare (isolate, Bolivia). The proposal is based on a quantitative analysis of a corpus consisting of video data from an interactive problem-solving task, the Family Problems Picture Task ( San Roque et al., 2012 ). On the proposed account, the demonstratives’ semantics encode the pragmatic processes involved in reference resolution. It is argued that this analysis offers a more adequate account of the corpus data than a spatial analysis. The proposed account supports the view that both the truth-conditional content and the non-truth-conditional pragmatic effects of the demonstratives are derived through pragmatic inference. In this way, the paper contributes to our understanding of the semantics-pragmatics interface, lending support to the idea of a pre-semantic pragmatics (e.g. Levinson, 2000 , Taylor, 2001 , Recanati, 2004 , Korta and Perry, 2008 , Korta and Perry, 2011 , Huang, 2013 , Lucking et al., 2015 ) and the inferential nature of truth-conditional meaning (e.g. Sperber and Wilson, 1986 , Sperber and Wilson, 1995 , Wilson and Sperber, 2004 ).