Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
A typology of demonstrative clause linkers (Diessel & Breunesse)
This week's paper talks about how demonstratives (e.g. "thus", "therefore", or "that") can grammaticalize into marking different kinds of clause linkage. It specifically focusses on (i) relative pronouns, (ii) linking and nominalising articles, (iii) quotative markers, (iv) complementisers, (v) conjunctive adverbs, (vi) adverbial subordinate conjunctions, (vii) correlatives and (viii) topic markers. Now onto the prompts:
- Have demonstratives grammaticalized to function non-prototypically in your language?
- Do they exhibit any of the functions listed above and in the paper?
- Do they work differently?
- What role do demonstratives play in general?
- How does your language express the contexts listed above, if not with demonstratives?
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
Submit your papers here!
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!