A Multifactorial analysis of this, that

Abstract

This paper focuses on the use of anaphoric constructions by learners of English. The objective is to propose a comparative analysis of it, this and that proforms between native English speakers (NS) and Spanish speakers learning English as a foreign language. Our analysis relies on a multi-corpus approach in which texts from two corpora underwent a multi-level tagging process including morophosyntactic and pragmatic annotation with situational vs contextual and given vs new information distinctions. A dataset containing 428 occurrences of it, this and that was automatically built with features from the annotation layers. We conducted three pairwise binomial logistic regression modelling analyses in order to identify factors in the selection of the three forms. Results show that some pragmatic features are significant factors in the way speakers select the forms. The fact that a proform refers to a new or inferred entity in the context plays a key role in its selection. Concerning learner-specific factors, the subject position of the proform this influences its selection.