All languages have demonstratives, but their form, meaning and use vary tremendously across the languages of the world. This book presents the first large-scale analysis of demonstratives from a cross-linguistic and diachronic perspective. It is based on a representative sample of 85 languages. The first part of the book analyzes demonstratives from a synchronic point of view, examining their morphological structures, semantic features, syntactic functions, and pragmatic uses in spoken and written discourse. The second part concentrates on diachronic issues, in particular on the development of demonstratives into grammatical markers. Across languages demonstratives provide a frequent historical source for definite articles, relative and third person pronouns, nonverbal copulas, sentence connectives, directional preverbs, focus markers, expletives, and many other grammatical markers. The book describes the different mechanisms by which demonstratives grammaticalize and argues that the evolution of grammatical markers from demonstratives is crucially distinct from other cases of grammaticalization.

This volume explores the use of demonstratives in the structuring and management of discourse, and their role as engagement expressions, from a crosslinguistic perspective. It seeks to establish which types of discourse-related functions are commonly encoded by demonstratives, beyond the well-established reference-tracking and deictic uses, and also investigates which members of demonstrative paradigms typically take on certain functions. Moreover, it looks at the roles of non-deictic demonstratives, that is, members of the paradigm which are dedicated e.g. to contrastive, recognitional, or anaphoric functions and do not express deictic distinctions. Several of the studies also focus on manner demonstratives, which have been little studied from a crosslinguistic perspective. The volume thus broadens the scope of investigation of demonstratives to look at how their core functions interact with a wider range of discourse functions in a number of different languages. The volume covers languages from a range of geographical locations and language families, including Cushitic and Mande languages in Africa, Oceanic and Papuan languages in the Pacific region, Algonquian and Guaykuruan in the Americas, and Germanic, Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages in the Eurasian region. It also includes two papers taking a broader typological approach to specific discourse functions of demonstratives.

This book concerns one of the paradigm examples of grammaticalization, the development of a definite article from a demonstrative determiner. Although standard written Finnish has no articles, the demonstrative se is currently emerging as a definite article in spoken Finnish. This book describes and explains the developing use of se based on a database consisting of spoken narratives from three different periods spanning the last one hundred years. The author proposes that the development from demonstrative to article has its roots in the way that speakers ordinarily use demonstratives in conversation, and provides an analysis of the use of se and the two other Finnish demonstratives, tämä and tuo in a corpus of multi-party conversations, showing that speakers of Finnish use demonstratives to focus attention on important referents and to express and negotiate access to them in the interactive context of ongoing talk, and not primarily to talk about how near or far referents are. The development of se into a general marker of identifiability is shown to be connected with both the focusing function of demonstratives as well as its use for referents which the speaker considers accessible to the addressee.

Demonstratives and Grammaticalization offers an in-depth analysis of the demonstrative system in Turkish. This book provides the first comprehensive analysis dealing with both the synchronic variations in Turkish demonstratives and their grammatical changes. It sheds light on the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the demonstratives, systematically describes the various usages of these forms, and provides a unified explanation for the various accounts of their distribution. While the focus is on Turkish, this analysis contributes to our understanding of how a demonstrative system operates in a language with a three-way distinction.

Atypical demonstratives have not received adequate attention in the literature so far, or have even been completely neglected. By providing fresh insights and discussing new facets, this volume contributes to the better understanding of this group of words, starting from specific empirical phenomena, and advances our knowledge of the various properties of demonstratives, their syntactic multi-functionality, semantic feature specifications and pragmatic functions. In addition, some of the papers discuss different grammaticalization processes involving demonstratives, in particular how and from which lexical and morphosyntactic categories they originate cross-linguistically, and which semantic or pragmatic mechanisms play which role in their emergence. As such, the different contributions guide the readers on an adventurous journey into the realm of different exotic species of demonstratives, whose peculiar properties offer new exiting insights into the complex nature of demonstrative expressions themselves.

This book explores, analyzes, and compares the use of German and Chinese demonstratives. Discourse and textual uses of the forms are considered, as well as their locative and temporal uses. The author observes that in both languages the demonstratives can be used to refer to referents. However, she departs from the common assumption that proximal demonstratives refer to entities or places close to the speaker, while non-proximal demonstratives refer to entities or places far from the speaker. Having analyzed a representative sampling consisting of a German text and a Chinese text, the author argues that both German and Chinese proximal demonstratives can signal the meaning of HIGH DEIXIS in a system of DEIXIS in the Columbia School of linguistics framework, whereas their non-proximal demonstratives can signal the meaning of LOW DEIXIS. In addition, Chinese demonstratives can be used under more circumstances than German demonstratives due to the lack of articles in Chinese. The author also argues that Cognitive Linguistic analysis is more helpful for new language learners, whereas the Columbia School of linguistics may be better suited to advanced learners who wish to know more about the intrinsic differences between words with similar meanings and uses. This book aims to help German learners better understand the German reference system. Readers with a Chinese language background will definitely benefit more from the book, as well as Chinese learners with a German language background. For pure linguistic enthusiasts and multi-linguals, the book offers an extensive introduction to the Columbia School of linguistics, and can open a new horizon for learning a new language comparatively.

Demonstratives play a crucial role in the acquisition and use of language. Bringing together a team of leading scholars this detailed study, a first of its kind, explores meaning and use across fifteen typologically and geographically unrelated languages to find out what cross-linguistic comparisons and generalizations can be made, and how this might challenge current theory in linguistics, psychology, anthropology and philosophy. Using a shared experimental task, rounded out with studies of natural language use, specialists in each of the languages undertook extensive fieldwork for this comparative study of semantics and usage. An introduction summarizes the shared patterns and divergences in meaning and use that emerge.