Abstract
Relatives which and that in a newspaper corpus. Differences in the conditions of occurrence of relative which and that between American and British English were confirmed by analysis of a newspaper corpus in both dialects. A set of hypotheses within the framework of A. Culioli's utterer-centred approach are examined to account for the distribution in the British corpus. It is suggested that which tends to mark a complex anaphora based on proximal deixis with identification and a scanning operation establishing the interior of a topological space, whereas that is the surface trace of a simpler distal form of deixis by differentiation, constructing an exterior topological space. The which relatives tend to be qualitative or qualifying and the that relatives to have specifying or contrastive properties.
Published Version
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