Last in, first out: Patterns of reduction in Romance demonstrative systems

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Demonstrative forms encode deictic features, which define the location of a referent in the external world in relation to a deictic centre. The encoding of deictic oppositions is however not diachronically stable, most commonly leading to poorer demonstrative systems over time: this paper explores the patterns of reduction attested by Romance (at face value) ternary demonstrative systems. Assuming that demonstrative forms are derived by person features, an account for such semantic reductions is proposed in terms of feature loss. More concretely, it is argued that change can be captured by a combination of featural and structural factors: the former determine computationally complex person(-related) categories, the latter determine which feature may be lost to ease said computational complexity.

Original languageEnglish
Article number11
Pages (from-to)1-40
JournalJournal of Historical Syntax
Volume7
Issue number6-19
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Terenghi.

Funding

∗ Earlier versions of this work were presented at NELS 51, IGG 46, and DiGS 22, whose audi-ences I would like to thank for their valuable questions and feedback. I owe special thanks to three anonymous reviewers for their careful and helpful comments and insightful discussion points, from which this paper benefited enormously. This work is part of my doctoral re-search: for extensive and crucial discussions on and support with various stages of this work, I am deeply grateful to my supervisors, Roberta D’Alessandro, Martin Everaert, and Luigi An-driani. All errors are of course my own. This research was initially funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement: CoG 681959_MicroContact).

FundersFunder number
Horizon 2020 Framework ProgrammeCoG 681959_MicroContact
European Research Council

    Keywords

    • Demonstratives
    • Romance languages
    • Morphology
    • Person features
    • Syntax
    • Semantics
    • Complexity

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