34.110, Calls: Historical Linguistics/Germany

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-110. Sat Jan 14 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.110, Calls: Historical Linguistics/Germany

Moderators:

Editor for this issue: Everett Green <everett at linguistlist.org>
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Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2023 05:35:17
From: Verónica Orqueda [vorqueda at uc.cl]
Subject: From and Towards Demonstratives: Grammaticalization Processes and Beyond

 
Full Title: From and Towards Demonstratives: Grammaticalization Processes and Beyond 

Date: 04-Sep-2023 - 08-Sep-2023
Location: Heidelberg, Germany 
Contact Person: Verónica Orqueda
Meeting Email: vorqueda at uc.cl
Web Site: https://www.slav.uni-heidelberg.de/forschung/tagungen/ichl26.html 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 20-Jan-2023 

Meeting Description:

The purpose of this workshop is to invite scholars working on different
aspects of the grammaticalization of demonstratives and from diverse
theoretical frameworks, in order to jointly elaborate a more complete map of
possible developments of demonstratives and their related aspects that have
taken place or are still taking place in languages of the world.


Call for Papers:

Call for Contributions to the workshop ''From and Towards Demonstratives:
Grammaticalization Processes and Beyond'', organized by Verónica Orqueda and
Berta González Saavedra, as part of the 26th International Conference on
Historical Linguistics
(https://www.slav.uni-heidelberg.de/forschung/tagungen/ichl26.html). 

Demonstratives are generally seen as deictic elements, which are primarily
used to point to a referent, focusing the hearer’s attention on an entity
(Diessel 1999). However, their nature, their inner possible classifications,
and their grammaticalization processes from and towards such a category have
long been topics of debate. With respect to the sources of demonstratives,
there is a well-known discussion regarding whether demonstratives can or
cannot develop from lexical sources. Thus, Heine et al. (2020: 421) claim that
“there are at least three main lexical sources that may lead to the emergence
of demonstrative categories. But these sources do not seem to exhaust the
range of pathways”, contra Diessel (2006: 481), who believes that
“demonstratives are so old that their roots are not etymologically
analyzable”.

As for the grammaticalization processes that start with demonstratives, it has
been noted that demonstratives can develop into complementizers, conjunctions,
copulas, definite articles, focus, third person pronouns, relatives and
subordinators, among others. As Diessel (1999) shows, the targets may vary
according to the syntactic classification of the source demonstratives. As
well, demonstratives are not restricted to one single path of
grammaticalization. Among examples of different targets that stem from the
same source, there is the case of Latin ille, which develops both as a
definite article (el) and as a third person personal pronoun (él) in Spanish
(see e.g., Giusti 2001, Roca 2009, and van Gelderen 2011), probably depending
on the different contexts. 
Particularly, the connection between demonstratives and personal pronouns
through grammaticalization processes is still a field of fruitful discussions,
and one may wonder whether demonstratives may develop as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd
person pronouns: there is plenty of evidence of 3rd person pronouns derived
from demonstratives, (see e.g., Heine and Kuteva 2002), while there is no
evidence of 1st person pronouns, and scarce evidence of 2nd person pronouns,
as is the case of anata in Japanese (distal demonstrative > 2nd sg. person
pronoun, see Ishiyama 2012 and Ishiyama 2019).

Regarding grammaticalization processes within the category of demonstratives,
there is also an ongoing debate on whether exophoric uses (this is, in speech
act situations) necessarily precede or not anaphoric or discursive uses. This
debate has a direct implication to the question of unidirectionality of
grammaticalization (see, e.g., Stavinschi 2012).

Lastly, recent cognitive investigations on the selection and use of
demonstratives can shed light of possible explanations for the development of
demonstratives. Thus, for instance, Peeters et al. (2021), among others, show
that the selection of specific demonstratives may be determined by the
communicational situation and the perception of the speaker-addressee
relationship, and not only by the proximity or distance of the object. Such
synchronic observations may lead one to wonder what cognitive factors are
behind the grammaticalization of demonstratives towards new functions.




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