Although adpositions commonly show spatiotemporal meanings and uses, it is not common that they include a deictic component in their meaning marking relative distance to a deictic center. However, in a small number of languages it is possible to indicate spatial or temporal deixis with adpositions. Such deictically-marked adpositions do not form a homogeneous class cross linguistically, but they are nonetheless of interest, as the possibility of such constructions has only rarely been mentioned, and in some languages such adpositions could be considered part of a language’s demonstrative system. This article investigates a diverse group of spoken languages and how deixis is marked in their adpositions, giving a preliminary categorization based on synchronic data, as well as looking at possible grammaticalization paths for the origin of such a rare phenomena. The most common path appears to be locative demonstratives grammaticalizing into adpositions, but other paths are also possible, including coverb constructions, such as those with locative coverbs, as well as those with the verbs ‘come’ and ‘go’.

Peer reviewed