Demonstratives

This chapter provides a survey of demonstratives in Australian languages. It discusses their morphosyntax, semantic and pragmatic functions, and potential grammaticalisation pathways, in relation to findings and questions from the general typological literature. Morphosyntactically, the focus is on their distribution across pronominal, adnominal, adverbial and identifying contexts, their inflectional possibilities, and their relation to other determining elements in nominal expressions. Semantically, I show that, while some Australian languages have simple systems of two or three demonstratives which can be used in a range of contexts, others have very complex and intricate systems, with a range of demonstratives each having specific spatial, non-spatial, anaphoric, recognitional and/or other senses. Finally, I make some observations on (signs of) grammaticalisation into definite markers, personal pronouns or relative pronouns.