| This thesis investigates the form and function of demonstratives from a crosslinguistic and diachronic perspective. It is organized into five chapters. The first chapter examines the morphology of demonstratives. It discusses the properties of demonstrative clitics, the inflectional behavior of demonstratives in different syntactic contexts, and the formation of demonstrative stems. The second chapter is concerned with the semantic features of demonstratives. Demonstratives encode two kinds of information: (i) deictic information, which indicates the location of the referent, and (ii) qualitative information, which characterizes the reference object. Chapter three deals with the syntax of demonstratives. It shows that demonstratives occur in four different syntactic contexts, in which many languages employ distinct demonstrative forms: (i) Pronominal demonstratives, which substitute for an NP in argument position of verbs and adpositions; (ii) adnominal demonstratives, which cooccur with a noun; (iii) adverbial demonstratives, which function as verb modifiers; and (iv) identificational demonstratives, which occur in certain copular and nonverbal clauses. Chapter four examines the pragmatic uses of demonstratives. Demonstratives are primarily used to focus the hearer's attention on entities in the speech situation, but they may also refer to linguistic entities in discourse and they are used to active private shared knowledge. The final chapter is devoted to diachronic aspects of demonstratives. The first part of this chapter discusses the development of eighteen grammatical markers that frequently emerge from a demonstrative. The central hypothesis of this section is that the grammaticalization path of a demonstrative is largely determined by the syntactic context in which it occurs. The second part of this chapter seeks to determine the origin of demonstratives. Most previous studies assume that demonstratives are derived from lexical items, but my investigation yields that there is no evidence from any language that demonstratives originate from a lexical source or any other source, for that matter, that is non-deictic. I suggest therefore the hypothesis that demonstratives are based on deictic elements that belong to the basic vocabulary of every language. |
