Deixis and person in Ibero- and Gallo-Romance demonstratives

Article Sidebar

PDF Review by Silvia Terenghi

Main Article Content

Judy Bernstein
https://orcid.org/0009-0006-9260-2755
Francisco Ordoñez
Stony Brook University (SUNY)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1845-4444
Francesc Roca
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9186-4899

Demonstratives in Romance languages display greater morphological complexity than the definite articles that developed from them, illuminating the internal structure of both sets of forms. Building on the work of Leu (2015), Bernstein et al. (1999), and others, we claim that Ibero- and Gallo-Romance demonstratives can be decomposed into a deictic or locative component and a definite determiner, and that an agreement relation involving person connects these two heads (cf. Guardiano & Stavrou 2020). Compared with their Latin precursors, which displayed a three-way system (1st/proximal, 2nd/medial, 3rd/distal), the modern Romance forms are relatively unstable: a loss of forms through grammaticalization is followed by a gain through realignment or addition of forms. Our analysis also builds on the ideas that the D head encodes person (Bernstein 2008a,b; Longobardi 2008) and that Romance demonstrative systems are person-oriented (Vincent 1999; Ledgeway 2015; Terenghi 2023). When a definite determiner is decoupled from its demonstrative source, as happened across Romance in its transition from Latin, it retains its person feature and loses its deictic force, which it subsequently regains.

Keywords
demonstratives, determiners, Ibero-Romance, Gallo-Romance, grammaticalization

Article Details

How to Cite
Bernstein, Judy et al. “Deixis and person in Ibero- and Gallo-Romance demonstratives”. Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics, 2025, vol.VOL 11, no. 5, pp. 1-24, doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.518.
Rights
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

(c) Judy Bernstein, Francisco Ordoñez, Francesc Roca, 2025

References

Abels, Klaus. 2003. Successive cyclicity, anti-locality, and adposition stranding. Doctoral dissertation, University of Connecticut.

Adams, James N. 2013. Social Variation and the Latin Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

ALA = Academia de la Llingua Asturiana. 1999. Gramática de la llingua asturiana. Oviedo: Academia de la Llingua Asturiana.

Álvarez, Rosario, Regueira, Xosé Luís, & Henrique Monteagudo. 1992. Gramática galega. Vigo: Galaxia.

AVL = Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua. 2006. Gramàtica normativa valenciana. Valencia: Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua.

Benveniste, Emile. 1946. Structure des relations de personne dans le verbe, reprinted in E. Benveniste (ed.). 1966. Problèmes de linguistique générale I, 225-236. Paris: Gallimard.

Bernstein, Judy B. 1997. Demonstratives and reinforcers in Romance and Germanic languages. Lingua 102: 87-113.

Bernstein, Judy B. 2001. Focusing the ‘Right’ Way in Romance Determiner Phrases. Probus 13: 1-29.

Bernstein, Judy B. 2008a English th- Forms. In A. Klinge, & H. H. Müller (eds), Essays on Nominal Determination: From Morphology to Discourse Management, 213-232. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Bernstein, Judy B. 2008b. Reformulating the Determiner Phrase Analysis. Language and Linguistics Compass 2: 1-25.

Bernstein, Judy B., Cowart, Wayne, & Dana McDaniel.1999. Bare Singular Effects in Genitive Constructions. Linguistic Inquiry 30(3): 493-502.

Bernstein, Judy B., Ordóñez, Francisco, & Francesc Roca. 2021. Emphatic pronouns and the development of definite articles: Evidence for a layered DP in early Romance. Journal of Historical Syntax 5: 1-32.

Bernstein, Judy B., Ordóñez, Francisco, & Francesc Roca. 2025. Up and Down Demonstratives [Conference session]. Inconcontro di Grammatica Generativa (IGG) 50, Pavia, Italy.

Bjorkman, Bronwyn, Hedde Zeijlstra. 2019. Checking Up on (ϕ-)Agree. Linguistic Inquiry 50 (3): 527-569.

Chomsky, Noam. 2000. Minimalist Inquiries: The Framework. In R. Martin, D. Michaels, & J. Uriagereka (eds), Step by Step: Essays on Minimalist Syntax in Honor of Howard Lasnik, 89-155. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Déchaine, Rose Marie, & Martina Wiltschko. 2002. Decomposing Pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 33(3): 409-442.

Enrique Arias, Andrés. 2018. Factores diatópicos en la variación entre este y aqueste en la historia del español. In M. L. Arnal Purroy, R. M. Castañer Martín, J. M. Enguita Utrilla, V. Lagüens Gracia, & M. A. Martín Zorraquino (coord.), Actas del X Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua Española, vol. 2, 1553-1569. Zaragoza: Diputación Provincial de Zaragoza / Institución Fernando el Católico.

Fabry, Marcel. 1951. Grammaire pratique du Wallon liégeois. Liège: Paul Gothier.

Flutre, Louis-Fernand. 1955. Le parler picard de Mesnil-Martinsart (Somme). Geneva: Droz.

García Fajardo, Josefina. 2009. Los demostrativos. Funciones y valores referenciales. In C. Company (dir.), Sintaxis histórica de la lengua española. Segunda parte: La frase nominal, vol. 1, 465-607. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica / Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

van Gelderen, Elly. 2011. The Linguistic Cycle: Language change and the language faculty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Giusti, Giuliana. 2001. The Birth of a Functional Category: From Latin ILLE to the Romance article and personal pronoun. In G. Cinque, & G. Salvi (eds), Current Studies in Italian Syntax. Essays offered to Lorenzo Renzi, 157-171. Amsterdam: North-Holland.

Guardiano, Cristina, Melita Stavrou. 2020. Dialect syntax between persistence and change: The case of Greek demonstratives. L’Italia Dialettale 81, 121-157.

Haigneré, Daniel. 1901. Le patois boulonnais. Boulogne-Sur-Mer: Société Académique de Boulogne-Sur-Mer.

Harris, Martin. 1977. ‘Demonstratives’, ‘articles’ and ‘third person pronouns’ in French: Changes in progress. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 93(3-4), 249-261.

Jespersen, Otto. 1917. Negation in English and Other Languages. Copenhagen: Host.

Jungbluth, Konstanze, & Rita Vallentin. 2015. Brazilian Portuguese. In K. Jungbluth, & F. Da Milano (eds), Manual of Deixis in Romance Languages, 315-332. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Kany, Charles E. 1945. American-Spanish Syntax. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kayne, Richard, Jean-Yves Pollock. 2010. Notes on French and English Demonstratives. In C. Jan-Wouter Zwart, & M. de Vries (eds), Structure Preserved: Studies in Syntax for Jan Koster, 215-228. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Kornfilt, Jaklin. 1997. Turkish. New York: Routledge.

Lebesgue, Philéas. 1984. Grammaire Picard-Brayonne. Amiens: Université de Picardie.

Ledgeway, Adam. 2012. From Latin to Romance: Morphosyntactic Typology and Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ledgeway, Adam. 2015. Varieties in Italy. In K. Jungbluth, & F. Da Milano (eds), Manual of Deixis in Romance Languages, 75-113. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Ledgeway, Adam, & John Charles Smith. 2016. Deixis. In A. Ledgeway, & M. Maiden (eds), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, 879-896. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Léonard, Lucien. 1972. One saye di creûjète de nosse patwès. Namur.

Leu, Thomas. 2015. The Architecture of Determiners. New York: Oxford University Press.

Longobardi, Giuseppe. 2008. Reference to Individuals, Person and the Variety of Mapping Parameters. In A. Klinge, & H. H. Müller (eds), Essays on Nominal Determination: From Morphology to Discourse Management, 189-211. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Meira, Sérgio. 2003. ‘Addressee effects’ in demonstrative systems: The cases of Tiriyó and Brazilian Portuguese. In F. Lenz (ed.), Deictic conceptualisation of space, time and person, 3-11. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Milroy, James, & Leslie Milroy (eds.). 1993. Real English. The Grammar of English Dialects in the British Isles. London: Longman.

Mulder, Walter de, & Anne Carlier. 2006. Du démonstratif à l’article défini: Le cas de ce en Français Moderne. Langue Française 152: 96-114.

Nagore, Francho. 1989. Gramática de la lengua aragonesa. Zaragoza: Mira Editores.

Panwitz, Amber. 2018. The System is definitely divided: A variationist analysis of Picard’s definite articles CH and L [Unpublished manuscript]. Indiana University Bloomington.

Pirsoul, Léon. 1902. Dictionnaire Wallon-Français (Dialecte Namurois), Tome 1 (A à L). Malines: L. & A. Godenne.

Postal, Paul. 1966. On so-called pronouns in English. In D. Reibel, & S. Schane (eds), Modern Studies in English, 201-223. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

RAE-ASALE (Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española). 2009. Nueva gramática de la lengua española. Madrid: Espasa.

Raposo, Eduardo B. P., Bacelar do Nascimento, Maria Fernanda, da Mota, Maria Antónia Coelho, Segura, Luisa, & Amália Mendes. 2013. Gramática do portugués. Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.

Remacle, Louis. 1952-1960. Syntaxe du parler wallon de La Gleize, Tomes 1-3. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.

Roberts, Ian. 2019. Parameter Hierarchies and Universal Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Roberts, Ian, & Anna Roussou. 2003. Syntactic Change: A Minimalist Approach to Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sánchez Rei, Xosé Manuel. 2002. Os pronomes demostrativos: Do latín ao galego contemporáneo. La Corunya: Universidade da Coruña.

Stavinschi, Alexandra. 2012. On the Development of the Romance Demonstrative Systems: Historical Remarks and Theoretical Conclusions. Diachronica 29(1): 72-97.

Terenghi, Silvia. 2023. Missing Person: Structure and change in Romance demonstratives. Ph.D. dissertation, Utrecht University.

Vincent, Nigel. 1988 [1997]. Latin. In M. Harris, & N. Vincent (eds), The Romance languages, 26-78. London / New York: Routledge.

Vincent, Nigel. 1999. The Synchrony and Diachrony of Deixis in Old Neapolitan [Unpublished manuscript]. University of Manchester.