Pathways to demonstratives and beyond

Abstract Demonstratives are generally assumed to be universal, but their diachronic pathways of development are notoriously obscure. If they were completely resistant to change through time, they should match across related languages, apart from regular processes of sound change. Languages of the Iroquoian family all contain demonstratives, as would be expected, but these are not all cognate. Closer examination reveals that they have developed from slightly different sources, but along parallel pathways. Their development has not stopped there, however. Some have evolved further into articles but to varying extents in the different languages. The articles are evolving further into nominalizers, forming both participant and event nominalizations. These nominalizations not only serve as referring expressions but are also coming to function much like dependent clauses in complex sentences.