Deixis and person in Ibero- and Gallo-Romance demonstratives

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.