Equative and simulative demonstratives in Sinitic and beyond Boban Arsenijević a , František Kratochvíl b and Joanna Ut-Seong Sio c a University of Potsdam, Germany b,c Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Abstract: Demonstratives are arguably the most basic deictic signs. They exist in all languages (Dixon 2003). In this paper, we focus on a type of demonstratives that are rarely studied: demonstratives that denote quality, manner and degrees. We call them equative and simulative demonstratives (ESDs). Anderson and Morzycki (2015), following Carlson (1977) and Gehrke (2015), argue that quality, manner and degrees are all kinds, ‘Quality’: kinds of objects, “manner”: kinds of events; “degree”: kinds of states. Umbach and Gust (2014) argue that ESDs (which they call “simulative demonstratives”) point to ad-hoc kinds that get established within the context. We show that this is supported by Chinese dialectal data (Mandarin, Cantonese, and Early Southern Min), where various lexical items meaning "type" can be seen following the demonstrative when referring to quality and manner, and degree. A closer look at the Sinitic and Slavic data shows that ESDs for quality and manner and ESDs for degree exhibit morphological differences, which are motivated by their semantic differences. Keywords: demonstratives, kinds, similatives, equatives 1. Introduction A wide variety of languages contain a kind of demonstratives that point not to a referent but rather to a property associated with that referent. It is similar to the English such. In English, such a bird roughly means “a bird of that kind”. In addition to the English such, there are also the Germanic so/zo, the Romance com-, the Slavic tak- and the Cantonese gam (Sio and Tang 2007, Sio 2011), among others. These demonstrative elements point to different kinds of properties depending on where they appear in. We present Polish data (taken from Anderson and Morzycki 2015), Cantonese data and German data (taken from Umbach and Gust 2014) for illustration below: (1) a. taki pies (quality) such-MASC dog “a dog of that kind” b. tak sie zachowywac (manner) such REFL behave “behave that way” c tak wysoki (degree)