The Grammaticalization of the Proximative in Tok Pisin

This article discusses the grammaticalization of Tok Pisin laik 'want/like/desire' (from English like) and klostu 'near' (from English close to) as markers of what Heine (1994b) has called the proximative with the meaning 'almost', 'nearly', 'be about to', etc. I will show that although klostu was more generally a feature of Pacific Pidgin English and began to grammaticalize in the mid-nineteenth century, it is now in competition with laik, which is a development specific to twentieth-century Tok Pisin, a pidgin/creole language spoken in Papua New Guinea. The fact that Tok Pisin has two constructions, of different origin and time depth, expressing the proximative yields valuable data contributing to a typology of a much neglected grammatical notion and sheds some light on the grammaticalization paths along which proximatives develop.