We examine demonstrative pronouns in a portion of the Santa Barbara Corpus of American English and propose a coding scheme that classifies pronouns with nominal as well as non-nominal antecedents into direct and indirect, depending on whether their referent is the same as the referent/denotation of the antecedent. In agreement with previous studies, we find that demonstratives more often have n...

This paper presents a study of the use of the Dutch proximate (dit, deze; this) and distal (dat, die; that) demonstratives. Previous studies on the use of demonstratives to refer to linguistically introduced objects addressed the notion of 'force'. Force consists of three strategies: 'givenness', 'noteworthiness' and 'foregrounding'. We show how these three strategies can be generalized to the ...

The paper reports preliminary results on Mandarin filled pauses (FPs), based on a large speech corpus of Mandarin telephone conversation. We find that Mandarin intensively uses both demonstratives (zhege ‘this’, nage ‘that’) and uh/ mm as FPs. Demonstratives are more frequent FPs and are more likely to be surrounded by other types of disfluency phenomena than uh/mm, as well as occurring more of...

We present a parallel corpus study that compares the distribution of German contracted/uncontracted articles and Mandarin bare nouns/demonstratives. Work by Schwarz (2009) Jenks (2018) leads us to predict contracted pattern with nouns uncontracted demonstratives. show these predictions are only partly borne out argue for more fine-grained typology definiteness.

Demonstratives are among the most frequent words in all languages, but demonstrative systems vary considerably between languages. In two experiments, we tested demonstrative use and the influence of demonstratives on spatial memory in Japanese and English – languages with purportedly very different demonstrative systems. Participants engaged in a ‘memory game’, tapping their use of demonstrativ...

The current article presents results from three quantitative corpus studies on the use of demonstrative expressions (demonstrative NPs, demonstrative pronouns) in German, English and Russian. It focuses on two prevalent hypotheses: 1) demonstratives correspond to the medium activation level; 2) demonstratives establish discourse topics. As for (1), it has been repeatedly claimed that referentia...