Attitudinal drifts and the rise of non-referential demonstratives as speaker stance markers

Demonstratives have been shown to be highly grammaticalizable, and they often extend further to also serve as pragmatic markers to help express the speaker’s (inter)subjective stance. Among the many extended uses of demonstratives are definiteness marking, topic marking, nominalization marking, subordinate clause marking, focus marking, and evidentiality marking (see, for example, Diessel 1999; Enfield 2003; Englebretson 2007; Kratochvil 2011; Nagaya 2011; Schapper & San Roque 2011; Mwinlaaru & Yap 2017, 2021; Brosig, Gegentana & Yap 2018; Iwasaki & Dechapratumwan 2021; inter alia). This panel focuses on the mechanisms of semantic and syntactic changes, as well as discursive contexts, that facilitate the rise of attitudinal demonstratives, where the term ‘attitudinal’ is used in the broad sense of ‘speaker stance’, covering both speaker’s subjective evaluation and affect as well as speaker’s intersubjective awareness (and often mindfulness) of addressee’s face, feelings, perspective and potential response. Emphasis for this panel is on the attitudinal drifts that give rise to non-referential uses of demonstratives as markers of speakers’ subjective and intersubjective stances.