Abstract
This paper examines a particular aspect of deixis, namely the use of demonstratives in some early Italo-Romance vernaculars, using a sample from the northern varieties and a sample from the South. The first part of the work is concerned with the distinction between binary distance-oriented systems (Lombard and Veneto) and ternary person-oriented systems (Sicilian), and their evolution from the Latin demonstrative system. The second part deals with the concept of markedness, first developed in the Prague School of linguistic theory, and applied to morphosyntactic categories and semantics by Roman Jakobson. Following Wunderli (1990), we have applied the concept of markedness to the demonstratives, in order to establish which term is the less marked, and functions thus as the central term in the demonstrative system.