Achieving autonomous virtual humans with coherent and natural motions is key for being effective in many educational, training and therapeutic applications. Among several aspects to be considered, the gaze behavior is an important non-verbal communication channel that plays a vital role in the effectiveness of the obtained animations. This paper focuses on analyzing gaze behavior in demonstrati...

Since Heubner's (1985) pioneering study, there have been many studies on (mis) use/ non-use of articles by L2 learners from article-less and article languages. The present study investigated how Persian L2 learners of English produce and interpret English definite descriptions and demonstrative descriptions. It was assumed that definite and demonstrative descriptions share the same central sema...

Demonstratives are among the most frequent words in all languages, but demonstrative systems vary considerably between languages. In two experiments, we tested demonstrative use and the influence of demonstratives on spatial memory in Japanese and English – languages with purportedly very different demonstrative systems. Participants engaged in a ‘memory game’, tapping their use of demonstrativ...

Suppose a speaker gestures toward four flowers and asks a listener, "How would you describe the color of this f lower?" How does the listener infer which of the four flowers is being referred to? It is proposed that he selects the one he judges to be most salient with respect to the speaker 's and his common ground-the i r mutual knowledge, beliefs, and suppositions. In a field experiment, it w...

German so is a demonstrative expression which picks up degrees or properties and combines as a modifier with gradable as well as non-gradable expressions. Like other demonstratives it can be used deictically and anaphorically, and in addition occur 'out of the blue', without a demonstration gesture or antecedent. If an 'out of the blue' use of so is combined with a gradable expression it yields...

________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Automatic recognition of demonstrative pronouns function in Arabic Anaphora resolution is one of the most difficult tasks in NLP. Classifying pronouns before attempting a task of anaphora resolution is important because to handle the cataphoric pronoun, the system should determine the antece...

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...