Abstract
Demonstrative pronouns in German occur in various paradigms such as die, diese, jene, diejenige, dieselbe, etc. Among these only the most frequent paradigm, die, has received attention from psycholinguistic research. In this paper, we investigate constraints on demonstrative pronouns from the diese paradigm. Diese-demonstratives are considered to be limited to formal language by native speakers, and in contemporary grammar they are assumed to prefer the most recent or the last mentioned antecedent. If these constraints really hold, diese-demonstratives seem to behave very differently from die-demonstratives which have been shown to prefer the antecedent that is not maximally prominent. We report three forced-choice experiments that test the constraints of language formality, order of mention and prominence through subjecthood. The results demonstrate that diese-demonstratives strongly prefer the formal language register as expected by native speakers. However, instead of the last mentioned antecedent, they prefer the antecedent that is non-prominent in terms of subjecthood which is similar to the preference that has been reported in the literature for die-demonstratives. We suggest that in a restricted context diese-demonstratives are formal counterparts of die-demonstratives.
Highlights
Personal pronouns in German are ambiguous with a weak preference to refer to the most prominent antecedent in the discourse, whereas demonstrative pronouns strongly prefer a less prominent antecedent; here the prominence could be because the antecedent is the subject of the clause (Bosch et al 2007; Kaiser 2011), agent of the clause (Schumacher et al 2017), topic of the discourse (Bosch & Umbach 2007; Hinterwimmer 2015) or perspectival center of the narration (Hinterwimmer & Bosch 2018)
In (1), the personal pronoun er has a weak preference to refer to Peter, the most prominent referent being the subject of the clause, but the demonstrative pronoun der clearly refers to Paul, the less prominent referent being the object of the clause
In comparison A, die-demonstratives were preferred with the object antecedents but they showed no effect of language register, they were used very rarely in general
Summary
Personal pronouns in German are ambiguous with a weak preference to refer to the most prominent antecedent in the discourse, whereas demonstrative pronouns strongly prefer a less prominent antecedent; here the prominence could be because the antecedent is the subject of the clause (Bosch et al 2007; Kaiser 2011), agent of the clause (Schumacher et al 2017), topic of the discourse (Bosch & Umbach 2007; Hinterwimmer 2015) or perspectival center of the narration (Hinterwimmer & Bosch 2018). Peteri wanted with Paulj jogging go but hei/j / die.demj was catch a cold ‘Peter wanted to go jogging with Paul, but he had a cold.’ This contrastive behavior of German personal and demonstrative pronouns has been studied through corpus, behavioral and ERP studies, as well as from a theoretical perspective. In a recent work, Hinterwimmer et al (2019) have provided more experimental evidence and suggested a modified version of Hinterwimmer & Bosch (2018) that encompasses the existing results. Their account suggest that demonstrative pronouns generally avoid the most prominent discourse referents as antecedents or binders. Bosch et al (2003) had hypothesized something similar — demonstrative pronouns prefer less salient referents — and had provided initial support to their hypothesis by analyzing the NEGRA corpus of written German
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