A Unified Account of the Properties of German Demonstrative Pronouns

In this paper I propose a unified account of two phenomena that have so far only been treated independently of each other: (I.) the strong tendency of German demonstrative pronouns (henceforth: D-pronouns or DEM) like der and die to be resolved to antecedents that have not been maximally salient in the preceding sentence, and (II.) the fact that D-pronouns cannot be interpreted as syntactically bound variables. I argue that both properties can be reduced to a principle that constrains the interpretation of D-pronouns in the following way: the variables they introduce cannot be resolved to the entity functioning as the current aboutness topic or to an element of the set functioning as the (current) aboutness topic. I. [1] and [2] have verified in a series of experiments and corpus-studies the long-standing observation that German D-pronouns in contrast to personal pronouns have a strong bias against being resolved to antecedents that have been the subject of the immediately preceding sentence: