Demonstratives on the move: What translational shifts tell us about demonstrative determiners and definite articles in Spanish and Dutch

Abstract

This paper explores the constructional meaning of NPs preceded by a demonstrative determiner and NPs preceded by a definite article, in both Spanish and Dutch. First, I will give a brief, general description of the meaning of the two constructions, focusing on three features: unique identifiability, deictic force and predicating force. Then, a contrastive analysis will show that demonstrative determiners and definite articles differ crosslinguistically. A quantitative analysis of translational shifts will reveal a systematic shift between Dutch demonstrative determiners and Spanish definite articles. Through the qualitative analysis of several subgroups of examples, I will show that the Dutch and Spanish paradigms differ with regard to the features of deictic and predicating force. Both Dutch demonstratives and definite articles seem to be more semantically bleached and hence more grammaticalized than their Spanish counterparts, which may well go some way to explaining the frequent and systematic translational shifts. Finally, I will draw attention to some specific phenomena, such as the cultural embeddedness of anaphoric relations, and the role of demonstratives in evoking a visual frame, which also motivate translational shifts between demonstratives and definite articles, but are better interpreted as local translator's decisions, rather than as systemic contrastive differences between Dutch and Spanish.