[Lingtyp] Demonstratives as nominalizers

[Juergen Bohnemeyer]

Dear Zahid – My first thought was, there must be hundreds of such languages if not thousands. But to my great surprise, a quick glance at Heine & Kuteva (2002) didn’t turn up a single hit. Odd. (Nor, thinking of Riccardo’s comment, do H&K give an example of definite article > nominalizer.)

Well, fwiw., Yucatec is a case in point. The basic facts are as follows:


  *   There are pronominal demonstratives lela’ ‘this’ (exophoric proximal) / lelo’ ‘that’ (generic indexical). These are restricted to the absolute right edge of the clause and topicalization/left-dislocation.
  *   Adnominally, the stem reduces to le for morphophonological reasons, which appears on the absolute left edge of the NP, and the final component of the pronominal form appears as a clitic particle =a’/=o’ with the same distribution as the pronominal demonstratives.
  *   Syntactic nominalization is expressed (if it is expressed morphologically, which is usually, but not always the case) by placing le on the absolute left edge of the nominalized form, which may be a stative predicate, a verb, a phrase, or a clause.

The following example is a description of a video clip in which a shorter woman pushes a taller woman, who as a result causes a tower of Styrofoam cups to collapse:

T-u=mèet-ah                              u=níik-ik                         le=bàaso-s-o’b          le=mas=nohoch=o’.
PRV-A3=do:APP-CMP(B3SG)   A3=scatter-INC(B3SG)     DEF=cup-PL-PL          DEF=more=big=D2
‘She made the bigger one scatter the cups.’

I gloss the demonstrative stem le(l) ‘DEF’ for convenience, but it functions both as a definite article and an adnominal demonstrative (minus the semantic distinction expressed by the clause-final particle).

The demonstrative system is described in Bohnemeyer (2018) and references therein (notably including Hanks 1990). A discussion of nominalized clauses (headless RCs) can be found in Bohnemeyer (2002: 129-143).

Regarding the question of grammaticalization, this comes down to how one would form syntactic nominalizations with indefinite reference. How would one say ‘a bigger one’ instead of ‘the bigger one’? I cannot give you a definitive answer (no pun intended). As an L2 speaker, I would say ‘one of the bigger ones’, and I’m confident that the demonstrative/definite article would be accommodated. But is it also possible to nominalize without the demonstrative/article, by directly combining the numeral ‘one’ (plus classifier) with the nominalized expression? I’m afraid IDK. If it is, then the proper expression of nominalization in Yucatec is not the demonstrative/article, but determination. If it isn’t, the demonstrative/article has been extended to the function of nominalization.

Best – Juergen

Bohnemeyer, J. (2002). The grammar of time reference in Yukatek Maya. Munich: LINCOM.
Bohnemeyer, J. (2018). Yucatec demonstratives in interaction: Spontaneous vs. elicited data. In S. C. Levinson, S. Cutfield, M. Dunn, N. Enfield, S. Meira, & D. P. Wilkins (eds.), Demonstratives in cross-linguistic perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (republication with permission of 2012 chapter in Schalley ed.). 176-205.
Hanks, W. F. (1990). Referential practice: Language and lived space among the Maya. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Heine, B., & T. Kuteva. (2002). World lexicon of grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.




Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Zahid Akter via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Date: Sunday, October 20, 2024 at 05:33
To: LINGTYP LINGTYP <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: [Lingtyp] Demonstratives as nominalizers
Dear Typologists,

I’m looking for languages where demonstratives function as nominalizers. If you are aware of any such cases, I would greatly appreciate your references.

Best regards,
Zahid



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