The many things that thing can become

Grammaticalization is often conceived of as a change from less to more grammatical, with loss of semantic content and the acquisition of a more grammatical status. However, the roles of discourse and prosody in grammaticalization processes are not often taken into consideration. This paper describes seven syntactic and two discourse functions of forms historically related to the noun meaning ‘thing’ in Sà’án Sàvǐ ñà Ñuù Xnúvíkó (Mixtepec Mixtec, Otomanguean). At the level of discourse, these forms, pervasive in unplanned speech, may function as hesitation markers and floor-keeping devices. The floor-keeping function, in turn, serves as a clause-combining device in discourse. The spoken nature of the corpus analyzed here allows us to see how information is distributed over Intonation Units (IU) and their combinations. This paper offers structural and prosodic evidence that some syntactic functions of these forms developed from discourse structures.