A demonstrative is a deictic proform whose deictic features do not reduce to identification of a speech-act participant.
This definition embraces a set of alternatives:
- The deictic category involved may be any. The definition only excludes pure person deixis; thus, personal and possessive pronouns are no demonstratives.
It includes, however, demonstratives which reduce to neutral demonstration in any of the categories without involving a deictic contrast. - The grammatical category of the proform may be any. The most important kinds of demonstratives are:
- demonstrative pronoun (or pronominal demonstrative)
- demonstrative determiner (or adnominal demonstrative)
- demonstrative adverb.
The subcategories are illustrated by the following examples:
- Deictic categories:
- neutral demonstration:
- third person: German dér ‘that (one)’
- space: German da = Engl. there
- no category: Yucatec le ‘that (object/space/time ...)’
- spatial demonstrative: here vs. there
- temporal demonstrative: now vs. then
- manner demonstrative: Yuc. beya' ‘this way’ vs. beyo' ‘that way’
- textual demonstrative: German dieser ‘the latter’ vs. jener ‘the former’.
The German dér is a third person demonstrative contrasting with the third person pronoun er ‘he’.
- Grammatical categories:
- demonstrative pronoun: Jap. kore ‘this one’
- demonstrative determiner: Jap. kono ‘this’
- demonstrative adverb: Jap. konata ‘this way’
In many languages, the same demonstrative forms serve as pronouns and as determiners. Thus, Latin hic - iste - ille ‘this (one) - that (one) near you - yonder (one)’.
There are also demonstrative copulas (Diessel 1997) and demonstrative verbs (Juǀ’hoan hè ~ kè ‘be PROXIMAL’ vs. tö'à ‘be DISTAL’; Lionnet 2013).
References
Diessel, Holger 1997, "Predicative demonstratives". Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Pragmatics and Grammatical Structure; 72-82.
Lionnet, Florian 2013, "The typology of demonstratives clarified: Verbal demonstratives in Juǀ’hoan". Unpubl. presentation.