Demonstratives, articles and topic markers in the Yi group

In Weining Neasu (a Burmese-Lolo language from South-West China), the system of demonstratives, articles and topic marking may be represented as follows There are three properties of this system which I want to address in this paper. First, the *a^55-set requires a classifier when determining a noun, while the *…*-set forbids classifiers. Second, the *a^55-determiners have a tendency to mark noun phrases of a relatively high activation state (in the sense of Chafe, Wallace L., 1976. Giveness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In: Li, Charles N. (Ed.), Subject and Topic. Academic Press, New York, pp. 25-55; Chafe, Wallace L, 1987. Cognitive constraints on information flow. In: Tomlin, Russell (Ed.), Coherence and Grounding in Discourse. Typological Studies in Language, Vol. XI. Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 21-51; Ariel, Mira, 1990. Accessing Noun-Phrase Antecedents. Routledge, London), while the *…*-determiners are more often associated with noun phrases of relatively lower activation. Third, *a^55-noun phrases occur more often in focus position, while *…*-noun phrases have a tendency to appear more frequently as the topic of a sentence (with n…^33-noun phrases being always topics). Based on these findings, I propose that the following multidimensional processes may have been at work in the diachronic production of the *…*-set out of the *a^55-set