Dutch and English Demonstratives: A Comparison  

Oleh:

Piwek, P.L.A. ; Cremers, A.H.M.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Sciences (Full Text) vol. 18 no. 3-4 (1996), page 835-851.
Topik: referring expressions; (deictic) demonstratives; focus; accessibility theory; minimal effort
Fulltext: 18_03-04_Piwek.pdf (1.35MB)

Isi artikel

In this paper we examine to what extent the use of demonstratives in Dutch differs from that in English. We look into the distribution of distal and proximate demonstratives (e.g. that vs. this, and in Dutch dat/die vs. dit/deze). In the literature the distribution of proximate and distal demonstratives in English and Dutch was found to be correlated with the so-called accessibility of the intended referent. Accessibility stands for the relative ease with which the addressee can identify the referent, and can be increased by factors like topic-hood and salience. Dutch proximate demonstratives are preferred for referring to entities which are relatively hard to access. English language users, according to some of the literature, follow the opposite strategy: they use proximate demonstratives to retrieve referents that are relatively easy to access. In both languages the use of distal demonstratives is equally distributed over more and less accessible referents. In order to check these findings we collected new data in an experimental setting. The new data led us towards a more finegrained notion of accessibility (in particular for physical domains), which takes temporal factors into account.

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