Lavukaleve has two demonstratives (cited here in their femining singular medial forms), foia 'this' and oia 'the other'. Foia is the default demonstrative, while oia has a
[...] much more restricted circumstances of use than the more general foia . It is used only for tracking (making reference to usually major participants in order to keep track of them throughout a narrative). But within this general tracking function, oia has a specific domain of usage. It is used to refer to an entity who is not the most activated one at the moment of speech. In practice, this means that someone who was in the conversation some short time ago will be referred to using oia , to mean ‘the one who I talked about before'. In narratives, oia is used most commonly to reactivate a non-activated participant. (Terrill 2003: 184)
Both demonstratives make the full range of gender-number distinctions (masculine, feminine, neuter; singular, dual, plural). In addition, each distinguishes degree of distance. Foia has four degrees (medial, proximal, distal 1, distal 2), while oia has only two degrees, medial and proximal. However -- and this is what is of interest here -- the paradigm of the proximal is restricted. Terrill reports that only the neuter singular appears in her corpus, and that
[...] attempts at elicitation of other proximal forms were unsuccessful. In fact, the singular neuter oga form was rejected in elicitation by some speakers, even though I have recorded it in use by others. (Terrill 2003: 184)
The full paradigm of oia is thus:
| proximal | medial | ||
| M.SG | ----- | oina | |
| F.SG | ----- | oia | |
| N.SG | oga | oiga | |
| M.DU | ----- | oinala | |
| F.DU | ----- | oiaol | |
| N.DU | ----- | oigala | |
| PL | ----- | oiva |
(Terrill also notes various pluralia tantum nouns, but these are semantically transparent: words such as 'teeth', and non-count mass nouns.)
Terrill, Angela. 2003. A grammar of Lavukaleve. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.