Journal of Historical Linguistics - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2025

Demonstratives are generally assumed to be universal, but their diachronic pathways of development are notoriously obscure. If they were completely resistant to change through time, they should match across related languages, apart from regular processes of sound change. Languages of the Iroquoian family all contain demonstratives, as would be expected, but these are not all cognate. Closer examination reveals that they have developed from slightly different sources, but along parallel pathways. Their development has not stopped there, however. Some have evolved further into articles but to varying extents in the different languages. The articles are evolving further into nominalizers, forming both participant and event nominalizations. These nominalizations not only serve as referring expressions but are also coming to function much like dependent clauses in complex sentences.

This study investigates demonstratives as the diachronic source of first/second person pronouns and shows that though several languages use them to designate the speaker/addressee, most usage does not conventionalize as first/second person pronouns despite the claim in previous studies. It then presents functional reasons that demonstratives rarely give rise to first/second person pronouns. This study additionally examines nouns and reflexives as the source of first/second person pronouns and shows that while it is relatively common for nouns to develop into first/second person pronouns, the same conclusion as demonstratives can be drawn for reflexives. I argue that the historical development of first/second person pronouns differs from that of third person pronouns due to speech-functional and discourse-pragmatic reasons. The development of the former concerns the speaker-addressee axis, thus more strongly affected than the latter by the tug of war between efficiency in linguistic communication and social success in interpersonal communication.

Khalkha Mongolian has recruited two new, addressee-oriented demonstratives from the spatial nouns naa- ‘close side of’ and caa- ‘remote side of’ with the attribute- or argument-referring suffix -d. With proximal naa-d, the addressee is close to and can sense the referent; with distal caa-d, the referent is somewhat distant from the addressee. In their demonstrative function, naa-d/caa-d usually combine with either the second person possessive clitic =čin or with a second person subject and the reflexive-possessive clitic =AA, so as to render orientation towards the addressee explicit (e.g., naa-d xüŋ=čin ‘the person on your remote side’), though these markers can be left out under certain circumstances. Distributionally, demonstrative naa-d/caa-d resemble the speaker-centered demonstratives en ‘this’ and ter ‘that’ rather than other spatial nouns such as dee-d ‘upper’. Among other spatial cases forms, the locatives naa-n/caa-n can express addressee-orientation, while allatives in -š(AA) cannot. Naa-d/caa-d also fulfill discourse-deictic anaphoric uses.

This paper elucidates the role of internal and external factors in the semantic evolution of Basque zu from ‘you.pl’ to exclusively ‘you.sg’ and in the development of Basque zuek ‘you.pl’. Transparently, zuek involves suffixation of the demonstrative hek ‘those’ to zu. The neighboring Romance languages exhibit a parallel evolution that involves the adjectival collocation vōs alteros ‘you others’, but other similar constructions are recorded. This paper defends the premise that Basque zuek emerged through a pattern replication process in which the pivotal feature was the morphological expression of number. We argue that the grammaticalization of zuek as ‘you.pl’ started in eastern areas due to contact with Occitan, a language in which grammaticalized ‘you.pl’ forms appear earlier than in Castilian Spanish. We also address an innovation exclusive to Basque: a series of second plural verbal forms which exhibit a geographically spread pattern within the Basque Country similar to that of the Romance innovative pronouns in the Iberian Peninsula.

This paper describes and analyzes the renewal of the demonstrative system in Hungarian, concentrating on the competing strategies of the Middle Hungarian period. After the definite article had grammaticalized in Hungarian, the demonstrative system renewed via two different strategies: reinforcement strategy and determiner doubling. The old and new strategies are introduced in the first, more descriptive part of the study, which is followed by an empirical investigation based on digitized historical corpora. Numerical evidence can show the measure of their spread as well as the change in their ratio. A coherent model of the syntactic change is also provided through formal representations of each structure under discussion. Finally, exploring the distributional properties of individual patterns in Middle Hungarian allows for the formation of a hypothesis about the upcoming outcome of their competition.

Albanian has a two-term demonstrative system, with proximal masculine ky and feminine kjo ‘this’ contrasting with distal masculine ai and feminine ajo ‘that’. The distal pronouns double as personal pronouns of the third person. Both demonstratives arose from the composition of two deictic elements. The second element (with nominative singular masculine -i/-y, feminine -jo, and neuter -ta) is the same for both pronouns and probably continues the PIE demonstrative *se/o-, *te/o-, although some etymological details are not clear yet. The origin of the first elements k(ë)- resp. a- is also disputed. In this article I will first briefly sketch the morphology of the two demonstrative pronouns in Old Albanian and then proceed to a re-evaluation of the etymological scenarios that may explain the rise and grammaticalization of ky and ai.

Medieval Insular Celtic languages possess definite articles, unlike their ancient Continental counterparts, which lack them. Since the 19th century, scholars have hypothesized that these articles in Insular Celtic languages evolved from earlier demonstratives. This grammaticalization process likely followed the path from demonstrative to definite article. However, systematic surveys of ancient Celtic data to understand this process have been lacking. This study aims to fill that gap by analyzing noun phrases in ancient Celtic languages featuring demonstratives to identify article-like uses and comparing them with medieval Celtic articles, especially in Old Irish.

Findings reveal that ancient Celtic demonstratives often function similarly to articles in medieval languages, acting as pronouns and determiners that agree in gender, number, and case with nouns. In Celtiberian, so- and sto- demonstratives appear in noun phrases with deictic and anaphoric referents. In Gaulish, so- demonstratives are used for deictic referents, while sindo- is used for anaphoric ones. Demonstratives are not used with semantically defined referents. The grammaticalization process aligns with Dryer’s (2014) hierarchy and, despite limited ancient documentation, confirms the evolution from demonstrative to definite article.