A Corpus-Based Study of Demonstratives in German, Russian and English

The current article presents results from three quantitative corpus studies on the use of demonstrative expressions (demonstrative NPs, demonstrative pronouns) in German, English and Russian. It focuses on two prevalent hypotheses: 1) demonstratives correspond to the medium activation level; 2) demonstratives establish discourse topics. As for (1), it has been repeatedly claimed that referential choice and the activation level of a referent in the memory of the speaker/listener are interconnected (e.g. Chafe 1994). We show that activation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for demonstratives to be used. Strikingly, hypothesis (2), the topic establishment as a function of demonstratives has not received sufficient support from our data for all three languages investigated. As a consequence, we suggest that an appropriate description of the discourse function of demonstratives requires a more detailed study of exemplary contexts beyond the scope of general discourse functions such as topic establishment and givenness marking. Thus, a qualitative study is performed based on the taxonomy of demonstrative functions as suggested by Krasavina (2004). Our results support the assumption that demonstratives prototypically serve as generalized shift-markers in discourse, and thus, both their givenness characterization and their potential to establish new discourse topics can be regarded as epi-phenomenal. This study presents preliminary research for corpus-based studies on multi-lingualism. 1 Humboldt-University of Berlin e-mail: [email protected] 2 University of Potsdam, Department of Applied Computational Linguistics e-mail: [email protected] 1. Background One of the central isues in the study of discourse anaphora is concerned with the problem of anaphoric distribution in discourse. For any entity to which reference is to be established there is a set of possible anaphoric expressions, all of them equially grammatical. In actual situation of use it is not the case that any of these possible forms is right, or appropriate. Here, the analysts are basically confronted with two perspecives: production and comprehension. In this work, we use the term “referential choice” which reveals the production perspective. In other words, we are concerned with the question: what contributes to the speaker’s choice of an appropriate anaphoric form? Demonstratives have an important place in the model of referential choice – they are among the most frequently used words in English, Russian and German. By investigating data from these languages, we expect to identify language-independent constraints underlying the choice of demonstratives as compared to pronouns and definite NPs.