This article explores the contrastive function of demonstratives in two languages, Tiriyó (Cariban, northern Brazil) and Lavukaleve (Papuan isolate, Solomon Islands). The contrastive function has to a large extent been neglected in the theoretical literature on demonstrative functions, although preliminary investigations suggest that there are significant di¤erences in demonstrative use in cont...

This study examines the functions and characteristics of demonstrative anaphora (this, these, that, those) in a collection of full-text scientific documents, confirming that they play an important role in maintaining discourse focus and binding together cohesive sections of text. Unlike corpora in other subject domains, the Cystic Fibrosis database contains more demonstrative expressions than a...

There is a well known tradition in the literature on definite Determiner Phrases (DPs) that concentrates on the asymmetries in the distribution and the anaphoric properties of determiners such as articles and demonstratives. A huge amount of work on the topic has been done on French by linguists like Kleiber, Corblin, Marandin, Maes, Apothéloz, Reichler-Béguelin or De Mulder, and on English by ...

In this paper, we present experimental evidence from a ‘yes’/’no’ judgement task and twoacceptability rating studies (Experiments 1a-c) for the claim made in Hinterwimmer (2019) thatsentences with two anaphorically interpreted complex demonstratives are less acceptable thansentences definite descriptions sentences where one ofthe previously introduced referents is picked up by demonstrative, wh...

In three experiments, we investigated the influence of two types of language on memory for object location: demonstratives (this, that) and possessives (my, your). Participants first read instructions containing demonstratives/possessives to place objects at different locations, and then had to recall those object locations (following object removal). Experiments 1 and 2 tested contrasting pred...