Holger Diessel

Holger Diessel

List of John Benjamins publications for which Holger Diessel plays a role.

Journal

Title

Subjects Historical linguistics | Typology

Articles

Breunesse, Merlijn and Holger Diessel. 2023. Chapter 7. Iconicity in spatial deixis: A cross-linguistic study of 180 demonstrative systems. Reconnecting Form and Meaning: In honour of Kristin Davidse, Gentens, Caroline, Lobke Ghesquière, William B. McGregor and An Van linden (eds.), pp. 185–207
This paper presents a cross-linguistic analysis of iconicity in demonstrative systems. Several previous studies have observed that the stem vowels of demonstratives correlate with the encoding of distance (e.g. Woodworth 1991). Nevertheless, there is little systematic research on iconicity in… read more | Chapter
Diessel, Holger. 2012. Bühler’s two-field theory of pointing and naming and the deictic origins of grammatical morphemes. Grammaticalization and Language Change: New reflections, Davidse, Kristin, Tine Breban, Lieselotte Brems and Tanja Mortelmans (eds.), pp. 37–50
Current research on grammaticalization argues that grammatical markers are generally derived from content words (or lexical expressions); but earlier research by Brugmann (1904) and Bühler (1934) showed that grammatical markers are also commonly derived from (spatial) deictics (or demonstratives).… read more | Article
Frequency and similarity are important determinants for the acquisition of children’s early item-based constructions. This paper argues that frequency and similarity are equally important for the development of more complex and intricate grammatical phenomena such as relative clauses. Specifically,… read more | Article
Review
This paper examines two types of expressions that seem to exist in all languages, demonstratives and interrogatives. Based on a representative sample of 100 languages it is shown that demonstratives and interrogatives have some striking features in common. They cross-cut the boundaries of several… read more | Article
Article