On the development of OE swā to ModE so and related changes in an atypical group of demonstratives

Building on previous comparative studies and comparative reconstructions (König 2012, 2015), we trace the syntactic and semantic development of OE swā, of its adverbial counterpart swylc and of þus to Modern English so, such and thus on the basis of relevant text corpora for OE and ME. In contrast to previous studies of swā in OE (cf. Schleburg 2002) and of so in ME (Nummenmaa 1973), it is shown that swā, swelc, thus and their counterparts in ModE are not isolated particles or adverbs, but are more adequately analysed as demonstratives of manner, quality and degree. Starting from a basic exophoric (gestural) use and its typical extensions to anaphoric and cataphoric uses, these expressions develop into a wide variety of grammatical markers in ModE.