The grammaticalization of specificity (and beyond) in boruca

Abstract

SPECIFICITY, as many other concepts of human experience, has various linguistic manifestations across languages, varying from lexical expression, e.g. adjectives, as in the English example in (1), to distinctions which make use of categories existing in the grammatical repertoire of a given language, as in Spanish (2), where the distinction between subjunctive and indicative serves to express a distinction of specificity;2 in other cases, a given morpheme takes on the function of expressing that notion; that is the case of Boruca (3), a Chibchan language of Costa Rica,