Grammaticalization of Adnominal Demonstratives in Neo-Aramaic. Towards the creation of a simple determiner

This paper focuses on the grammaticalization of adnominal demonstratives towards simple determiners in Neo-Aramaic, a dialectal cluster belonging to the Semitic family. Scholars still do not agree about the presence of a definite article in NA and in Aramaic dialectology the systems of demonstratives and determiners have not yet received sufficient attention from a comparative point of view. New grammaticalized items seem not to act like traditional determiners since they encode, besides definiteness, a related though not totally overlapping feature: specificity.