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The Grammaticalization of the Proximative in Tok Pisin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Suzanne Romaine
Suzanne Romaine*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
*
Merton College, Oxford OX1 4JD, UK [suzanne.romaine@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk]
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Extract

This article discusses the grammaticalization of Tok Pisin laik 'want/like/desire' (from English like) and klostu 'near' (from English close to) as markers of what Heine (1994b) has called the proximative with the meaning 'almost', 'nearly', 'be about to', etc. I will show that although klostu was more generally a feature of Pacific Pidgin English and began to grammaticalize in the mid-nineteenth century, it is now in competition with laik, which is a development specific to twentieth-century Tok Pisin, a pidgin/creole language spoken in Papua New Guinea. The fact that Tok Pisin has two constructions, of different origin and time depth, expressing the proximative yields valuable data contributing to a typology of a much neglected grammatical notion and sheds some light on the grammaticalization paths along which proximatives develop.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 75 , Issue 2 , June 1999, pp. 322 - 346
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 Linguistic Society of America

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