How to do words with 'things': Multiple grammaticalization from 'thing' in Tupi-Guarani

In the Tupi-Guarini languages the ancestral 'thing' word has developed a fair number of grammatical uses, either on its own or together with other material. The paper surveys these uses and their diachronies, with respect to both general issues of grammaticalization from a 'thing' source or to debates specific to TupiGuarani languages. We first survey pronominal uses (indefinite, interrogative, and negative) and discourse particle uses. Then we turn to morphological functions serving incorporation, intransitivization and nominalization. We also deal with negative and privative functions.