Data from the world’s languages illustrate that demonstratives
grammaticalize as temporal auxiliaries/copulas, as focus markers, and as
visual evidentials. However, these studies were done on the basis of
individual languages or a specific grammaticalization path. In contrast, this
paper argues that the various grammaticalization patterns of demonstratives
reported in the world’s languages are not totally isolated, but rather can be
united by a single feature, distance: i.e., the spatial distance from the deictic
center is conceptually transferred to temporal and evidential /epistemic
(speaker’s certainty associated with focus markers) domains. Moreover, since
studies of this type of semantic extension are often concentrated on languages
of Africa, the Americas, and Oceania, this paper adds cases from the Japonic
languages to broaden the applicability of the proposed conceptual domain
transfer, especially from space to epistemicity (focus). Specifically, this paper
discusses the development of the cleft-like kakari musubi construction in Old
Japanese and Old Okinawan, in which proximal, mesial, and distal
demonstratives grammaticalized as focus markers are used in assertive,
assertive/interrogative, and interrogative sentences respectively. It argues
that such pathways represent a cognitively sound conceptual domain transfer
from space to epistemicity and an embodied inverse relationship between
spatial distance and epistemic certainty.