The purpose of this account of how deixis is encoded in Toda Sedeq, an Austronesian language indigenous to Taiwan, is two-fold; to contribute to 1) the description of a completely neglected dialect of a poorly understood language which faces language replacement and is in urgent need of description and 2) the theoretical understanding of deixis. From a theoretical standpoint, deixis has five categories, with a hierarchy as to which are most often represented in various language phenomena, viz.,: 1) ‘space’, 2) ‘person’, 3) ‘time’, 4) ‘social relations’ and 5) ‘discourse’ (in descending order). This hierarchy helps explain numbers of phenomena representing each category in the grammar of a given language, and also how likely a given category is to serve as the ‘template’ for combinations with other categories (e.g., ‘space’ is a template for ‘spatio-personal deixis’). For the target language, the categories are represented by numbers of phenomena that support the following hierarchy: 1) the most, with 2)-3) following, and practically nothing for 4)-5). Additionally, for two-way category combinations, 1) space was found to combine with all other categories, but 2) person with only two and the other three categories with none at all - also in keeping with the hierarchy. Finally, in the only triple category combination (spatio-personal-temporal deixis), categories 1) - 3) were all found to play important roles. The Sedeq deictic morphemes work in groups rather than independently (seven morphemes are combined into eight groups, each of which forms a grammatical subsystem, with multiple membership for all morphemes). The five-category deixis, category combinations, and morpheme grouping models have resulted in what I believe accounts for the deictic phenomena of the language more completely than any previous attempt. It also has implications for theoretical linguistics and raises questions to be addressed in the future description of other languages.

The study of Melkisedeq has been highly fragmentary among modern scholars, proving to be difficult to discuss over the long Second Temple Period. This study will focus on the social memory of Melkisedeq to understand the evolution of the tradition surrounding his character among sectarian groups in the Second Temple Period. Through an analysis of the components from the Hebrew Bible that compromise the social memory of Melkisedeq a deeper understanding of how his memory is used by later groups can be made. The redaction and expansion of his character changes greatly over time. The study of social memory allows scholars to understand how different memories form within a collective group, thus exploring the societal and ideological elements of disparate groups that form the over-arching memory of Melkisedeq. In order to properly identify these memories, redactional, historical, and textual criticisms will be employed to analyze the texts of Melkisedeq, answering such questions as: Who is Melkisedeq? What is the relationship between Melkisedeq and the king of Sodom? What is a priest-king? Did Abram tithe to Melkisedeq? This study will address the Near Eastern context of Melkisedeq in Genesis 14, in order to examine which features of his social memory are accentuated or excluded in Second Temple literature.