The development of addressee agreement on demonstratives

The person-oriented nature of a demonstrative system can be marked explicitly by incorporating person markers into demonstratives. When these distinguish gender or number, this can lead to an unusual type of allocutivity: addressee agreement on medials. The latter development is cross-linguistically rarely reported, but is attested in Siwi Berber, Quranic and Rāziħ Arabic and arguably Imperial Aramaic. Examination of these and other languages shows a pathway whereby demonstrative systems gain addressee-anchored terms through grammaticalisation of a phrase including an oblique second person pronoun, occasionally producing addressee agreement. The semantic properties of allocutivity help explain the rarity of the latter result.