Indefinites: The scenarios of parallel development

The paper examines the development of indefinite pronouns in Russian and Nivkh. The grammaticalization of the Nivkh verb ‘to be (like this), to do (like this)’ has led to the emergence of the particle hagin, which serves as a quantifier denoting free-choice and functioning as a negative polarity item. These meanings frequently coincide across languages, but their sources may vary. Questions arise regarding why distinct forms perform identical functions in different languages and what their origins might be. Another issue concerns the status of forms that yield these new grammatical meanings in Nivkh. To address these issues, our research reconstructs the grammaticalization process for these forms based on the analysis of Nivkh texts. We aim at establishing the semantic and syntactic grounds facilitating the grammaticalization scenario for these forms and introduce the idea of parallel development. It suggests that novel units undergoing grammaticalization activate a new pattern in the language community. These emerging patterns make the grammaticalization of additional lexical and grammatical material in the same function easier. In such a way, a new “structural flow” is created, and it gets consistently filled up with more and more material resulting in the grammaticalization output with the same functions.