In ‘‘Complex Demonstratives: A Quantificational Account’’ (MIT Press 2001) (henceforth CD), I argued that complex demonstratives are quantifiers. Many philosophers had held that demonstratives, both simple and complex, are referring terms. Since the publication of CD various objections to the account of complex demonstratives I defended in it have been raised. In the present work, I lay out the...

On the basis of comparisons between the corpus of English Majors’ Composition of Ludong University (EMC corpus) and other corpora as well as among different levels in EMC corpus, this thesis studies the feature of using frequency and stages of development of demonstratives used by Chinese English Majors. The result reveals that English Majors of lower and higher grades tend to overuse and under...

This paper studies the noun phrase structure of Paiwan demonstratives by examining in detail the typology of demonstratives, possessives and numerals in Formosan languages. Four main issues are addressed: in Formosan languages (A) whether the word order variation in nominals may be best accounted for along the lines of the antisymmetry condition in Kayne (1994); (B) whether demonstratives, poss...

Demonstrative noun phrases (e.g., that guy, this) are of interest to philosophers of language and semanticists because they are sensitive to demonstrations or speaker intentions. The interpretation of a demonstrative therefore sheds light on the role of the context in natural language semantics. This survey reviews two types of approaches to demonstratives: Kaplan’s direct reference treatment o...

It has been widely acknowledged that the choice of Japanese demonstratives (the distal a-series, the medial so-series, and the proximal ko-series) in their anaphoric use is regulated by the rules concerned with the interlocutors’ knowledge of the referent. In crosslinguistic discussions of anaphoric demonstratives, on the other hand, the effect of the interlocutors’ knowledge of the referent ha...

This paper presents preliminary work on a corpus-based study of Korean demonstratives. Through the development of an annotation scheme and the use of spoken and written corpora, we aim to determine different functions of demonstratives and to examine their distributional properties. Our corpus study adopts similar features of annotation used in Botley and McEnery (2001) and provides some lingui...

The present study aims to investigate the use of demonstratives in argumentative writing by Chinese EFL learners. A corpus-based study was conducted. In this study, demonstratives this, that, these, those, as well as it were tagged and analyzed. By the quantitative and qualitative analysis, the study shows the general features and typical errors of learners in using demonstratives. Some pedagog...

Abstract Although there has been growing interest in the study of demonstratives, a number demonstrative categories remain largely unexplored. This article addresses one gap, presenting preliminary typological overview predicative type used primarily non-verbal predication constructions. The morphosyntax demonstratives is first briefly examined, followed by characterization based on semantic an...

Demonstrative terms are highly contextdependent elements both in deictic and anaphoric uses. When reference is transferred from a visual, threedimensional context to the textual domain, information-structure factors (i.e. the cognitive status of the antecedent, recency of mention, syntactic structure or the semantic type of the antecedent) have an effect on speaker preferences for selecting dem...

Drawing on previous analyses of the social meaning of demonstratives and other function words, we argue that the semantics of demonstratives facilitates affective uses that can be characterized as attempts by the speaker to foster a sense of shared perspective and common ground with other discourse participants. We present large-scale quantitative evidence that this strategy is widely used and ...