Locational adverbs in Colombian Spanish conversation

[Extract] The Spanish locational adverb system comprises five terms which are traditionally divided in two ways. First they are divided into three sets on the basis of some idea of distance: aqui and acá (both corresponding in some sense to English here) are treated as indicating location close to the speaker, ahi (corresponding to there) are considered either to indicate a location close to the hearer or else a location medium-distant from speaker; and alli and allá (also corresponding to there) are considered to be either distant from both speaker and hearer, or alternatively far-distant from the speaker (cf. Section 4). On another axis, these adverbs are treated as belonging to two series, those ending in -i and those ending in -a (cf. Section 6). The two series are typically understood in terms of either location (-i) versus direction (-a), or specific (-i) versus more general locations (-a), although advocates of both theories admit that the distinction is not absolute. While there is disagreement about precisely what the distinction between the two series is, it is widely agreed that the formal difference between the adverbs corresponds to a semantic or functional difference (cf. Terrado Pablo 1990: 63), that is, that "the adverbs ending in -i seem to fall into one category, and those ending in -á in another" (Sacks 1987: 292)