Goal: Create demonstrative modifiers
Note: Create proto-forms and reduced forms, as needed.
Tip: These forms co-occur with a head noun.
Work focus: Create/Make/List
Now that you’ve spent time brainstorming ideas for the demonstrative modifiers in your language, take time today to actually create any forms you need, which may mean creating new proto-forms for lexical sources. You could, of course, also decide that the demonstratives are so old in your language that they have just always existed—that means you need to create proto-forms that, from their earliest stages, were used to indicate demonstrative information.
These forms are modifiers. That is, they will occur with a head noun, such as “this” and “that” in the English phrases this cat, that hat, this idea, that question. We will come back to the demonstrative system later to talk about pronoun forms, but that is a future decision.