Demonstratives: Form, Function, and Grammaticalization (review)

All languages possess demonstratives (dem(s)). Notwithstanding their ubiquity, there has not been a study devoted to a survey of their forms, features, and functions across languages prior to Holger Diessel’s fascinating volume, which is based upon a highly diversified sample of 85 languages; it is clearly written and filled with useful tables.

Following his ‘Introduction’ (1–12), D provides four chapters on the synchronic analysis of the morphology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics, respectively, of dems. The chapter on ‘Morphology’ (13–33) explains that while most dems are tonic, dem clitics do occur, but usually only adnominally. Dems may bear a variety of inflectional features—number, gender, and/or case, in descending order, are the most common; these are often determined by the role that the particular dem plays in the syntax. Perhaps the most interesting of these synchronic chapters is ‘Semantics’ (35–55), which describes the semantic distinctions signaled by dems. Aside from the common locative, D describes systems which code visibility, height relative to the speaker, geographical features, and motion of the referent relative to the speaker. He also discusses marking for ontology, animacy, humanness, sex, number, and boundedness. ‘Syntax’ (57–92) addresses the syntactic functions which dems can play—determiners, pronominals, adverbs, and interestingly, identifiers, e.g. ‘Here’s your food’. D also devotes a considerable portion of this chapter to arguing that dem articles are not determiners, but appositional pronominals, which causes him to reject Abney’s DP hypothesis. The chapter on ‘Pragmatics’ (93–114) divides dems into those employed exophorically, i.e. ‘with reference to entities in the speech situation’, and endophorically, i.e. for all other uses as anaphora and markers of deixis and to indicate recognition, i.e. information which is ‘discourse new’ and ‘hearer old’. D proposes that the exophoric use of dems is original while their endophoric uses reflect some degree of regrammaticalization.

The longest chapter in the volume, ‘Grammaticalization’ (115–55), is diachronic in orientation. D provides a striking review of the numerous categories into which dems can regrammaticalize: Third person pronominals, relative pronominals, complementizers, sentential connectives, and possessives from pronominal dems, definite articles and nominal class markers, boundary markers of postnominal relative clauses/attributes, determiners, number markers, and specific indefinite articles from adnominal dems, temporal adverbs and directional/locational preverbs from adverbial dems, and nonverbal copulas, focus markers, and expletives from identificational dems. The chapter culminates with a discussion of the diachronic source of dems: D’s important conclusion is that ‘there is no evidence from any language that demonstratives developed from a lexical source or any other source, for that matter, that is nondeictic’ (150); they probably belong, then, to the basic lexicon of all languages.

A summary of major findings and suggested directions for future research complete the volume. This is an important book, not only for typologists, but for all linguists, and especially those about to begin fieldwork on undescribed languages.