Demonstratives

Abstract Demonstratives are a particular class of deictic expressions that can serve a variety of grammatical functions. Traditionally, demonstratives are categorized as pronouns and adjectives; but recent research in typology has argued that demonstratives can also function as determiners (Himmelmann 1997), adverbs of space, manner, and degree (König 2012, 2017), nonverbal predicators (Killian 2021), and verbs (Guérin 2015; Breunesse 2019). Building on this research, this chapter provides a cross-linguistic overview of the way demonstratives are organized in grammatical word classes. It is argued that, while the word-class categories of demonstratives are language-particular (Croft 2001), there is a cross-linguistic tendency for demonstratives to grammaticalize into certain categories, e.g. pronouns, determiners, adverbs, identifiers, and verbs. The chapter builds on the typology of demonstrative word classes proposed in Diessel (1999) but draws on a larger and more balanced database and integrates the results of recent cross-linguistic research on demonstrative verbs, predicators, and manner adverbs.