Rethinking microvariation in Romance demonstrative systems

This article explores the formal and functional organization of Romance
demonstrative systems, providing a detailed empirical overview of the vast microvariation
attested in standard and non-standard Romance varieties. Despite highlighting a
considerable number of distinct demonstrative systems based on different
superficial person contrasts, it is argued that the underlying number of systems can
effectively be reduced to a much smaller number of systems based on a finite number
of options. In particular, it is argued that the feature geometric analysis of person
developed by Harley & Ritter (2002) makes some specific predictions about the
range and types of person combinations, and hence by implication also the types
and natural classes of demonstrative systems, that are cross-linguistically available.
Adopting these assumptions, it is argued that these differing person feature
specifications can be profitably modelled in terms of a set of hierarchically-organized
interrelated parametric options in accordance with much recent work developed
within the ReCoS group.