Yesterday’s eve

Abstract This chapter surveys the patterns of polysemy (or, ‘colexification’) exhibited by deictic temporal adverbs denoting ‘yesterday’, ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’ in a sample of forty-five Australian Aboriginal languages. While some polysemic links are ubiquitous (such as the colexification of ‘today’ and ‘now’), others are extremely rare (e.g. the Mbararam term alŋgi , which colexifies ‘yesterday’ and ‘down river’). To probe the patterns of semantic change underlying more common cases of colexification — such as between ‘tomorrow’ and ‘morning’ — I consider cases of partial colexification, where the two meanings are formally differentiated despite sharing a common root. In such cases, it is most often the time of day temporals ‘morning’ and ‘afternoon’ that are diachronically prior, with deictic temporals ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ morphologically derived from them.