Demonstratives

This paper investigates the position of the language of conference interpreters along the written-oral cline. The use of demonstratives in a corpus comprising transcriptions of interpretation exams shows how students tend to overexploit those morphological resources in order to ensure consistency and coherence to their texts.

This paper addresses the problem of the emergence of the le/la/les-determiners in the diachrony of French. In particular, it focuses on the issue of their inconsistent distribution viz. the observation that during a long period of time the le/la/les forms in French do not pattern as either the demonstratives from which they originate (Late Latin ille), nor as definites, which they end up becoming in Modern French. We model the phenomenon as a competition between two structures associated with different truth and felicity conditions and test model's predictions in contexts which differ with respect to whether and what kind of the relevant conditions they satisfy. We show that the quantitative corpus data are consistent with all of the predictions we make concerning the relative rates of spread of the l-forms in various contexts. In addition, the two environments we identify on theoretical grounds as contexts of reanalysis, relational nouns and noun phrases with relative clauses, are shown to be associated with the highest and most constant rates of the l-forms, in line with our predictions.

The proposition 'When a language dies, a culture dies' gives a reason for preserving endangered languages, but raises valid questions in light of recent work on multilingual communities and on the conservatism of some aspects of language use in situations of language shift. It is claimed that these objections are met if the proposition is revised to say that interrupted transmission of an integrated lexical and grammatical heritage spells the direct end of some cultural traditions, and the unraveling, restructuring, and reevaluation of others. In support of this, it is argued that in situations of language shift, ancestral and replacing languages are not equivalent vehicles for cultural maintenance or expression. An extended empirical case is made on the basis of Central Alaskan Yupik Eskimo demonstrative use.

It is often thought that consciousness has a qualitative dimension that cannot be tracked by science. Recently, however, some philosophers have argued that this worry stems not from an elusive feature of the mind, but from the special nature of the concepts used to describe conscious states. Marc Champagne draws on the neglected branch of philosophy of signs or semiotics to develop a new take on this strategy. 

The term “semiotics” was introduced by John Locke in the modern period – its etymology is ancient Greek, and its theoretical underpinnings are medieval. Charles Sanders Peirce made major advances in semiotics, so he can act as a pipeline for these forgotten ideas. Most philosophers know Peirce as the founder of American pragmatism, but few know that he also coined the term “qualia,” which is meant to capture the intrinsic feel of an experience. Since pragmatic verification and qualia are now seen as conflicting commitments, Champagne endeavors to understand how Peirce could (or thought he could) have it both ways. The key, he suggests, is to understand how humans can insert distinctions between features that are always bound.

Recent attempts to take qualities seriously have resulted in versions of panpsychism, but Champagne outlines a more plausible way to achieve this. So, while semiotics has until now been the least known branch of philosophy ending in –ics, his book shows how a better understanding of that branch can move one of the liveliest debates in philosophy forward.

This dissertation develops a new framework for reconstructing the diversity of a language at a given historical time period. It applies this framework to the problem of reconstructing the diversity of Arabic dialects immediately prior to the Islamic conquests, which spread speakers of these dialects across much of North Africa and the Middle East. The study first establishes a theoretical framework for reconstructing historical speech communities, defined as groups of speakers linked by shared allegiance. It then analyzes the tribal and non-tribal social organization in Pre-Islamic Arabia, and provides a detailed historical overview of how the Islamic conquests contributed to the Arabization of the conquered territories. Finally, the dissertation reconstructs the linguistic history of the Arabic demonstratives, using them as a variable to determine which speech communities existed in pre-Islamic Arabic, where they were located in time and space, and how the diversity of those communities is related to the diversity of modern Arabic dialects.

"Spatial deixis has long been the locus of concentrated research due to its propensity to assume multiple functions in spatial-temporal domains. This study investigates the interconnections among spatial deixis, Motion predicates, and aspect markers in Kavalan, an engendered Austronesian language. Specifically, the proximal near-hearer demonstrative (yau ‘that’) may function as a Motion predicate, indicating the referent of the subject either located within or coming
into speaker’s proximal sphere. The same demonstrative also conveys progressive aspect when followed by a verb. On the other hand, the distal demonstrative (wi’u ‘that yonder’) is morphologically related with the Motion verb wi(ya), which predicates the referent of its subject as either located outside or going out of speaker’s proximal sphere. In addition, this verb is associated with inchoative or continuous aspect when followed by another verb, depending on the semantics of the second verb. Therefore, the distal demonstrative shares a parallelism with the proximal near-hearer demonstrative, both linking spatial reference, Motion predication, and temporal contouring functions, which can be ultimately attributed to the conceptual analogy between space and time."

The present study investigates the use and development of demonstratives that follow head word, postposed demonstratives, which are characteristic of eastern Finnic and North Russian dialects. Some previous studies regard these postposed demonstratives as definite articles, while other recent studies identify additional functions related to information structure and discourse. Given that postposed demonstratives are not a feature common to all East Slavic languages, several studies propose that this characteristic feature of North Russian could have resulted from language contact with the Uralic-speaking population who adopted Russian as their second language, particularly Finnic speakers.

The main goal of the present study is to answer three research questions:
1) How do postposed demonstratives function as grammatical markers?
2) What does the development of demonstratives tell us about the history of Finnic and Slavic languages?
3) Do postposed demonstratives result from a Finnic substratum in North Russian dialects?

For this purpose, the present study examines spoken language data comprising thirteen Finnic and two North Russian varieties which have been in contact during the latest millennium, as well as Novgorod birch bark documents from the 11th–15th centuries. The typological analysis identifies properties and functions of postposed demonstratives from various perspectives: word order, host attachment, syntactic and pragmatic functions. The analysis also combines results with geographical data, which shows the correlation between the speaking areas and linguistic similarities among varieties.

The results achieved in the present study justify the following conclusions. First, postposed demonstratives function as grammatical markers with a basic function to organise information structure. At the same time, the properties of information-structural uses as topic and focus markers have secondarily extended to contexts of use in which postposed demonstratives co-occur with definite referents, and are used to code the speaker’s evaluation. The functional extension is particularly common in North Russian dialects and adjacent Finnic varieties in the east. Second, the development of demonstrative systems from Proto-Finnic to modern Finnic languages is influenced by later contacts among Finnic sub-branches that share areal features. Based on these isoglosses, the Finnic demonstrative system can be classified into four groups: 1) western Finnic (Livonian, South Estonian, and North Estonian), 2) central Finnic (Votic and Ingrian), 3) Karelian Finnic (Olonets Karelian and Northern Lude), and 4) eastern Finnic (Southern Lude and Veps). Third, the postposed demonstrative “-to” and its variants in North Russian dialects do not result from the Finnic substratum, but from the adstratum. Through mutual reinforcement with the Veps demonstrative “se”, the indeclinable “-to” inherited from the Central dialect of Middle Russian has developed further properties to inflect and co-occur more often with definite referents. Such a developed pragmatic use later also spread to Lude and Olonets Karelian.


Настоящая работа исследует развитие и употребление характерного для восточных прибалтийско-финских и севернорусских диалектов типа указательных местоимений, так называемых постпозитивных демонстративов, отличающихся позицией после определяемого слова. В ранней научной литературе постпозитивные демонстративы считались определёнными артиклями, тогда как дальнейшие исследования позволили установить функции, связанные с актуальным членением и дискурсом. Так как постпозитивные демонстративы не встречаются в других восточнославянских языках, предлагалось объяснить их наличие в севернорусских диалектах контактным влиянием прибалтийско-финских языков.

Основные задачи работы заключаются в следующих вопросах:
1) Какими грамматическими функциями обладают постпозитивные демонстративы в исследуемых языках?
2) Что можно сказать об истории исследуемых языков в свете данных о развитии демонстративов?
3) Связано ли происхождение постпозитивных демонстративов в севернорусских диалектах с прибалтийско-финским субстратом?

Материалом для исследования послужили речевые корпусы тринадцати прибалтийско-финских и двух севернорусских вариантов, а также новгородские берестяные грамоты XI–XV веков. В работе анализируются с типологической точки зрения такие характеристики постпозитивных демонстративов, как линейный порядок, тип связи с определяемым словом, синтаксические и прагматические функции. Результаты типологического анализа связываются с географическими данными с тем, чтобы проследить взаимосвязанность географической близости и языковых сходств между исследуемыми вариантами.

Результаты настоящей работы следующие. Во-первых, основная грамматическая функция постпозитивных демонстративов связана с актуальным членением предложения, однако в севернорусских диалектах и соседних восточных прибалтийско-финских вариантах наблюдаются и вторичные функции, сочетающийся с определённым референтом и употребляющийся как маркеры оценки говорящего. Во-вторых, развитие праприбалтийско-финской системы демонстративов в языках-потомках усложнялось контактами между отдельными прибалтийско-финскими языками, приобретавшими общие ареальные черты. На основе наблюдавшихся изоглосс предлагается классификация прибалтийско-финских систем демонстративов на четыре группы: 1) западную (ливский, южноэстонский, северноэстонский), 2) центральную (водский, ижорский), 3) карельскую (олонецкий, севернолюдиковский) и 4) восточную (южнолюдиковский, вепсский). В-третьих, постпозитивный демонстратив «-то» и связанные с ним формы в севернорусских диалектах не являются результатом прибалтийско-финского субстрата, а скорее адстрата. Под взаимным влиянием вепсского демонстратива «se» и унаследованного из центрального диалекта среднерусского языка неизменяемого местоимения «-то» последнее постепенно приобрело формы склонения, а также начало чаще сочетаться с определённым референтом. Такая же прагматическая функция впоследствии распространилась и на людиковский и олонецкий языки.

En este trabajo se defiende que el adverbio afirmativo "bai" funcionaba inicialmente como un demostrativo de manera y que el prefijo de subordinación "bait-" surgió de la gramaticalización de "bai". Desde esta perspectiva, las partículas "ba-", "bai" y "bait-" del euskara mantendrían una relación formal y funcional semejante a la que se da en latín entre "si", "sic" y "acsic". Avala esta hipótesis el hecho de que, en los textos más antiguos, bait- se documenta a veces con unos valores discursivos parecidos a los que tiene el sí preverbal del occitano y el catalán. Las diferencias posteriores se justifican por la afijación de bai al verbo. Esta afijación favoreció una gramaticalización más intensa, que convirtió a "bait-" en un subordinante polifuncional, pero restringido a las subordinadas asertivas o presupuestas, como ocurre en las subordinadas causales.

Lan honetan defendatzen da "bai" baiezko adberbioak hasieran moduzko erakusle gisa funtzionatzen zuela, eta "bait-" aurrizki menderagailua bairen gramatikalizaziotik sortu zela. Ikuspegi honen arabera, euskarako "ba-", "bai" eta "bait-" partikulek erlazio formal eta funtzionala mantenduko lukete, latineko "si", "sic" eta "acsic"-en artean aurkitzen denaren berdintsua. Hipotesiaren alde egiten du testu zaharrenetan lekukotzen den bait-en balio diskurtsiboa okzitanierako eta katalaneko aditz aurreko síren antzekoa izateak. Ondoko desberdintasunak bai aurrizki bezala aditzari gehitu izanarekin arrazoitu daitezke. Aurrizkitzeak gramatikalizazioari mesede egin zion; bait- menderagailu polifuntzional bihurtu zuen, baina adierazpen eta aurresuposiziozko menpekoetara mugatua, kausazko menpekoetan gertatzen den bezala.

The aim of this paper is to provide a minimalist account of adnominal demonstratives along the lines of a recent proposal by Giusti (2015) which distinguishes three types of feature sharing: Agreement, Concord, and Projection. As demonstratives bind and identify an open position in the argument structure of N, they are claimed to be arguments and, as such, to undergo Agreement. But unlike possessor arguments, which are assigned genitive and are sent to the interfaces independently of the possessee phase, demonstratives are probed to the Edge of the phase and are interpreted as part of it. In order to do so, they must also concord with N, namely they must check and delete uninterpretable N-features. This dual nature of demonstratives as agreeing arguments and concording modi-fiers can explain the diierent positions demonstratives display across languages, as well as their apparently ambiguous behavior as determiners, as adjectives and as exophoric elements, as claimed by Diessel (2006).

There is a large body of research indicating that speakers of (familiar) European languages tend to encode and conceptualize space from an egocentric perspective, but linguistic fieldworkers have shown that speakers of certain other languages (e.g. Tzeltal) often describe the same spatial scenes based on fixed coordinates of the environment. This has led some researcher to challenge long-standing assumptions about semantic universals of space and the uniformity of spatial cognition. Specifically, Levinson and colleagues have questioned the hypothesis that there is a universal preference for egocentric, body-oriented representations of space in language and cognition. It is the purpose of the present paper to reconsider this hypothesis in light of an important class of spatial terms that has been disregarded in this research: demonstratives such as English this and that and here and there. The paper shows that the semantic interpretation of demonstratives presupposes a coordinate system with the same conceptual constituents as body-based expressions such as left and right or up and down. Combining evidence from linguistic typology with psychological research on joint attention, it is argued that demonstratives constitute a universal class of spatial terms that invoke an egocentric, body-anchored frame of reference grounded in basic principles of spatial and social cognition.

Should we deal with Frege’s Puzzle on semantic grounds? Is the cognitive value of language an aspect of meaning? Frege himself assumed an affirmative answer to those questions, and so did many direct reference theorists, such as David Kaplan and John Perry. Even though they defend a theory that is anti-Fregean by nature, they share the view that it is semantics’ business to account for Frege’s Puzzle and cognitive value. There are two traditional ways to do so in referentialist semantics. One is via character and the other via reflexive content. My aim in this dissertation is to argue that both fail. To do that, I first examine what exactly Frege’s Puzzle is, and if what traditionally goes under the name of “Frege’s Puzzle” really corresponds to the puzzle that Frege himself formulated. I then examine how the solutions to the puzzle in terms of character and reflexive content are supposed to work for indexicals, where they are most appealing, and for proper names. I argue that there is no version of these solutions that is able to account for all the relevant phenomena. I conclude that, if this is the case, then we have serious reasons to suspect that Frege’s Puzzle should not be explained by semantics, and that cognitive value is not an aspect of meaning as it is often supposed.

Nakh-Daghestanian languages have encountered growing interest from typologists and linguists from other subdiscplines, and more and more languages from the Nakh-Daghestanian language family are being studied. This paper provides a grammatical overview of the hitherto undescribed Sanzhi Dargwa, followed by a detailed analysis of the grammaticalized expression of spatial elevation in Sanzhi. Spatial elevation, a topic that has not received substantial attention in Caucasian linguistics, manifests itself across different parts of speech in Sanzhi Dargwa and related languages. In Sanzhi, elevation is a deictic category in partial opposition with participant-oriented deixis / horizontally-oriented directional deixis. This paper treats the spatial uses of demonstratives, spatial preverbs and spatial cases that express elevation as well as the semantic extension of this spatial category into other, non-spatial domains. It further compares the Sanzhi data to other Caucasian and non-Caucasian languages and makes suggestions for investigating elevation as a subcategory within a broader category of topographical deixis.

This paper is largely exegetical/interpretive. My goal is to demonstrate that some criticisms that have been leveled against the program Gareth Evans constructs in The Varieties of Reference (Evans 1980, henceforth VR) misfire because they are based on misunderstandings of Evans’ position. First I will be discussing three criticisms raised by Tyler Burge (Burge, 2010). The first has to do with Evans’ arguments to the effect that a causal connection between a belief and an object is insufficient for that belief to be about that object. A key part of Evans’ argument is to carefully distinguish considerations relevant to the semantics of language from considerations relevant to the semantics (so to speak) of thought or belief (to make the subsequent discussion easier, I will henceforth use ‘thought’ as a blanket term for the relevant mental states, including belief). I will argue that Burge’s criticisms depend on largely not taking account of Evans’ distinctions. Second, Burge criticizes Evans’ account of ‘informational content’ taking it to be inconsistent. I will show that the inconsistency Burge finds depends entirely on a misreading of the doctrine. Finally, Burge takes Evans to task for a perceived over-intellectualization in a key aspect of his doctrine. Burge incorrectly reads Evans as requiring that the subject holding a belief be engaged in certain overly intellectual endeavors, when in fact Evans is only attributing these endeavors to theorists of such a subject.
Next, I turn to two criticisms leveled by John Campbell (Campbell, 1999). I will argue that Campbell’s criticisms are based on misunderstandings – though they do hit at deeper elements of Evans’ doctrine. First, Campbell reads Evans’ account of demonstrative thought as requiring that the subject’s information link to an object allows her to directly locate that object in space. Campbell constructs a case in which one tomato (a) is, because of an angled mirror, incorrectly seen as being at a location that happens to be occupied by an identical tomato (b). Campbell claims that Evans’ doctrines require us to conclude that the subject cannot have a demonstrative thought about the seen tomato (a), though it seems intuitively that such a subject would be able to have a demonstrative thought about that tomato, despite its location is inaccurately seen. I show that Evans’ position in fact allows that the subject can have a demonstrative thought about the causal-source tomato in this case because his account does not require that the location of demonstratively identified objects be immediately accurately assessed. What is crucial is that the subject have the ability to accurately discover the location. Second, Campbell criticizes Evans’ notion of a fundamental level of thought. I show that this criticism hinges on view of the nature and role of the fundamental level of thought that mischaracterizes Evans’ treatment of the notion.

Areal distribution of the frequency of the post-positive article in the Timok vernacular of Southeast Serbia
The post-positive article is an unstressed particle derived from demonstrative pronouns and used as a definiteness marker, while retaining its demonstrative meaning. In the Timok dialect, an eastern variant of the Prizren-Timok dialect of Serbian, it follows a noun (bratat, ženava, deteno) or a modifier (moav starac). The post-positive article is one of the most salient features of the Timok dialect, differentiating it from standard Serbian and other Serbian dialects. In contrast to Serbian, the article is used in standard Bulgarian and Bulgarian dialects that border on the Timok area, as well Macedonian to the south. The frequency of the use of the article in the Timok area varies throughout the territory where the dialect is spoken, with major differences between one village or speaker and another. This study examines the parts of the Timok area where the article is used more frequently and the reasons for this. The data samples are taken from transcripts of ethnolinguistic fieldwork interviews recorded between 2015 and 2017. The study aims at identifying the influence of surrounding languages on the use of the post-positive article in the narrative samples. Contact with these languages is expressed in geographical terms. The effect of areal and geographical factors such as the proximity of the Bulgarian border, longitude and latitude, altitude and the proximity of Knjaževac (the administrative centre of the area), were examined using standard statistical correlation tests. The results show a notable effect of altitude as an indicator of remoteness, but influence by Bulgarian has not been determined. This implies that the use of the post-positive article is affected more by contact with the culturally more highly-rated Serbian than with Bulgarian and Macedonian, which are typologically closer.

The paper considers the hypothesis that proper names are simple demonstratives. In the first part, I provide the general motivation for an indexical treatment of proper names as well as assess the strengths and weaknesses of existing indexical accounts. The second part is devoted to proposing a new account that treats proper names as simple demonstratives which referents are determined by the speaker's referential intention. In my proposal, I use the hybrid approach towards indexical expressions developed e.g. by Wolfgang Künne (1992) and Stefano Predelli (2006). I argue that this approach allows countering many of the problems haunting existing indexical accounts of proper names. I also consider the Humpty-Dumpty objection to intentionalism regarding demonstrative reference (Gorvett 2005) and show, how the proposed approach may counter it. The considerations concerning this problem also demonstrate, how the treatment of proper names as hybrid demonstratives may allow solving the problems posed by the "Madagascar argument" to the causal-chain theory of proper name reference (Evans, Altham 1973) as well as explain the cases of slips-of-tongue and intention-convention reference mismatch.

The author points out an unclarity in linguistic discourse representation
theory, as developed by Hans Kamp. This unclarity concerns the concept of
internal anchoring in the case of anaphoric backwards reference. Following this,
the author sketches his own account of cognitive dynamics, on the basis of which
he finally makes an alternative proposal on the semantics/pragmatics of both referential expressions in general and anaphoric pronouns as well as demonstratives in
particular.

This dissertation presents arguments in favour of an explicit Logical Form representation of components responsible for direct referentiality and domain restriction in definites, with a focus on Austro-Bavarian German, Standard Swedish, and Standard Canadian English.

It provides a semantico-pragmatic analysis of the ban on wh-subextraction out of DPs with the “strong” articles in Austro-Bavarian and demonstratives in English which as- sumes their direct referentiality. The ungrammaticality of question formation is proposed to result from the pathological uninformativeness of its possible answers. The ban on wh- subextraction thus emerges as a new testing tool for direct referentiality.

I further propose an analysis of the cases where strong articles and demonstratives do not behave directly referentially. Assuming structural decomposition of strong articles and demonstratives into a determiner head and a relational head, I propose that directly referential interpretation results from a silent individual pronoun occupying the specifier of the relational head, whereas covarying interpretations arise as a result of either a restrictive relative clause occupying this position, or else a relational noun functioning as the relational component itself. I proceed to extend this approach to account for the distribution of strong and weak definite articles in DPs with restrictive relative clauses.

In the second part I analyze the pattern of the free-standing article omission in Swedish. I identify the omission with the use of a covert restrictor-less definite article, which accounts for why it is easily available with context-sensitive modifiers whose semantics has to make reference to a domain restrictor, but is limited to the cases of “global uniqueness” with context-insensitive ones. Thus Swedish, I propose, illustrates the case of a “rudimentary” article which, if the only one available, would make the problem of incomplete descriptions unsurmountable. This conclusion relies on, and thus provides evidence for, the unavailability of either domain restriction at the NP-level or implicit global restriction of the domain of individuals as a means of modelling the behaviour of Swedish definites.

Keywords: communication, semantics/pragmatics, direct reference theory, singular thoughts, Russell's Principle, Generality Constraint, Husserl, Evans, Perry, twin examples, demonstratives, demonstrative identification, perception, perceptual content

The incredible diversity of Arabic dialects makes it difficult to find linguistic isoglosses that can adequately differentiate between dialects across the Arabic-speaking world. This article proposes a diachronically situated classification of the Arabic dialects according to the form of their demonstrative pronouns, illustrated with a sample of over sixty dialects. Four major dialect groups are classified based on the form of their plural demonstratives: Dialects with (1) taː feminine singular, called consonant-alternating dialects; (2) reflexes of plural *haːʔula, called hawla dialects; (3) reflexes of masculine plural *ðaːʔula, often with feminine plurals derived from *ðaːʔila and possibly *ðaːʔala, referred to as ðawla dialects; and (4) Dialects with reflexes of plural *ðuː, called haːðuː dialects. The article compares these groups to established dialect classifications, finding that they reinforce some while calling the validity of others into question.

This paper suggests that reference to phenomenal qualities is best understood as involving iconicity, that is, a passage from sign-vehicle to object that exploits a similarity between the two. This contrasts with a version of the ‘phenomenal concept strategy’ that takes indexicality to be central. However, since it is doubtful that phenomenal qualities are capable of causally interacting with anything, indexical reference seems inappropriate. While a theorist like David Papineau is independently coming to something akin to iconicity, I think some of the awkwardness that plagues his account would be remedied by transitioning to a more inclusive philosophy of signs.

This thesis presents a comprehensive analysis of the Blackfoot demonstrative system. Previous research on Blackfoot (Uhlenbeck 1938, Taylor 1969, Frantz 2009) identifies sixteen morphemes that make up demonstrative words in the language. I propose a demonstrative template that takes into account the fixed morpheme ordering observed in demonstrative forms. Based on the proposed template, I motivate the analysis of the suffix -ka as encoding motion towards the speaker as this accounts for its position together with the suffixes -ya, -ma, and -hka, each of which encode features of motion or visibility. In describing situational functions of each of the morphemes, I make use of Imai’s (2003) inventory of spatial deictic features. I present the first analysis of the morphologically analyzable, but heretofore undescribed suffix -o as encoding the geometric configuration feature [interior]. This thesis also offers the first explanation of the syntactic contexts that govern the two identificational suffixes -ayi and -ao’ka.
Earlier analyses of the Blackfoot demonstrative system focus on the spatial features encoded by situational uses of demonstratives to the exclusion of other pragmatic functions. As a result, the proposals do not address variations in meaning when used in non-situational pragmatic contexts. To address this gap in the literature, I examine non-situational pragmatic functions, as well as symbolic situational demonstrative uses (e.g. deictic projection, wider-context). The result of this study is a comprehensive analysis of the Blackfoot demonstrative system which takes into account both syntactic and pragmatic functions, providing new insights into the meanings of many of the morphemes that comprise the system. It also provides support from Blackfoot for Himmelmann’s (1996) claim that there are four universal pragmatic functions of demonstratives, and support for Diessel’s (1999) claim that situational uses are the basic demonstrative uses from which the others are derived.

In this study I provide a description of the morphosyntax and the functions of demonstratives in Juba Arabic and Ki-Nubi, two closely related Arabic-based contact languages. The study describes the process of acquisition of demonstrative pronouns and determiners and it explains the formal and functional changes that have taken place in the demonstrative system of Arabic as a consequence of pidginization and subsequent creolization. Broadly speaking, the reduction of the inflection of Arabic demonstratives and the gradual loss of their deictic value corresponds to a change of their grammatical functions along the common grammaticalization path deictic demonstrative > anaphoric demonstrative > definite article. However, Juba Arabic and Ki-Nubi clearly differ in terms of both forms and functions of pronominal and adnominal demonstratives. If Juba Arabic demonstratives are characterized by a certain morphological continuity with those of its Arabic lexifier, Ki-Nubi gives evidence of an innovative, and rather complex, system of demonstrative pronouns and determiners. This morphosyntactic divergence is also reflected on a functional ground insofar as the adnominal demonstrative de “this” is mainly used as a tracking device in Juba Arabic, while it can mark nominal definiteness in Ki-Nubi. The study thus proposes a unified diachronic hypothesis that accounts for a greater degree of grammaticalization of nominal determination in Ki-Nubi as a result of its radical creolization.