Abstract
Apart from personal pronouns which are by far the most used referring expressions in English and Serbian, reference can be established and maintained using demonstratives. Their function is to refer to the location or distance of a person or an object. The aim of this paper is to examine reference realised by demonstratives with special regard to the restrictions written discourse imposes on their usage. The texts we used for analysis are narrative stories written in the two languages.
Highlights
One of the commonest way to maintain once established reference is by means of personal pronouns, reference can be maintaned in other ways
Our aim in this paper is to show the reference made by demonstratives in narrative stories written in English and Serbian
In the reference of a text demonstrative determiners fulfill their referential function if they occur with a noun, i. e. dependently, as in the example excerpted from our corpus: When he reached for the gearshift the boy in front accommodated him by swinging his hairless knees out of the way
Summary
One of the commonest way to maintain once established reference is by means of personal pronouns, reference can be maintaned in other ways. There is a rule that can be more or less applied generally: demonstrative determiner in a combination with a noun may refer to animate and inanimate entities while demonstrative pronouns usually refer to inanimate entities. This and that anaphorically refer to what has previously been said, Halliday and Hasan (1976: 59) claim that this is more specific than that since this has the speaker as its point of reference while that has no particular reference point it is interpreted as not this. The pronouns of this type in Serbian can refer to the qualitative characteristic of the entities being referred to: Vaši očevi su bili hrabri, a i vi ćete biti takvi. (Stanojčić, Popović 1997: 91)
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