The development and loss of directional deixis in the history of English

Just like most Romance languages, Modern English has almost completely lost the formal means of distinguishing between location and direction in the course of its history. Starting out from the distinctions made in OE between ‘location’ and ‘direction’ in its grammar and lexicon, this paper analyzes the relevant systems of demonstratives, adverbs and interrogative pro-forms for the different historical periods of English, with a focus on the spatial subsystems, including their formal and semantic properties (spatial vs. extended use), their historical development and their loss. The results of this descriptive survey are summarized and discussed from a more general, comparative and typological perspective, thus revealing characteristic properties of Pres.-Day English.