Polysemy, overt marking, and function words

Abstract Evidence is assembled from 129 globally distributed languages showing universal tendencies in ways in which deictic functions are nomenclaturally related in languages. For example, these data indicate that roughly 62 percent of the world's languages either merge applications similar to those of English that and there under a single term (polysemy) or relate these functions through overt marking constructions. In addition, development of polysemy involving deictics is often unidirectional; for example, creation of that/there polysemy typically entails extending a term for that to there rather than vice versa. Deictic functions investigated include those pertaining to personal pronouns, the definite article, demonstratives, and temporal and spatial adverbs. Diachronic evidence from historical-comparative linguistics is presented which attests to regular directions of polysemy development inferred from synchronic cross-language data. Finally, an explanatory framework is proposed outlining similarities among deictic applications which probably facilitate their regular nomenclatural association.

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