The morphosyntax of demonstratives in synchrony and diachrony

This study investigates the morphosyntactic properties of demonstratives and their development into grammatical markers. It is based on a representative sample of eighty-five languages. The first part argues that demonstratives occur in four different syntactic contexts and that languages differ as to whether they employ demonstratives of the same or of different grammatical categories in these contexts. The second part shows that demonstratives are a common historical source for a wide variety of grammatical items and that the grammaticalization path of a demonstrative is crucially determined by the syntactic context in which it occurs.