Manner deixis as source of grammatical markers in Indo-European languages

Recent typological and areal studies of demonstratives, such as Himmelmann (1997), Diessel 1999, 2006), Dixon (2003), Güldemann (2008) and Krasnoukhova (2012), have contributed extensively to our knowledge of possible deictic systems. What is notably absent from these descriptions, however, are demonstratives expressing the semantic dimensions MANNER, QUALITY and DEGREE in addition to their deictic components. As a result of this neglect, the relevant demonstratives (e.g. German so, Ital. cosi, Finn. näin, noin, niin, Jap. koo, soo, aa) are frequently analyzed only in an atomistic fashion as isolated particles, without relating them to existing systematic analyses of demonstratives. The first goal of this cross-linguistic study is to provide a general analysis of such demonstratives, which includes their morphological properties (simplex or composite), their syntactic behavior as members of various categories and their semantic properties of combining two dimensions of meaning, viz. a deictic dimension (proximal, medial, distal, visible, etc.) and a content dimension in terms of the ontological categories ‘manner’, ‘quality’ and ‘degree’. In the second and major part of this paper I will discuss another neglected aspect of the relevant demonstratives, viz. their role in processes of grammaticalization and thus in the genesis and development of various grammatical categories. Starting out from the well-known extensions from exophoric to anaphoric and cataphoric, these demonstratives also develop into propositional anaphors, comparative markers, adverbial connectives, as well as quotative, exclamative and approximative markers in a wide variety of languages.

Published online: 29 April 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.169.02kon