Demonstratives as spatial deictics or something more? Evidence from Common Estonian and Võro

Abstract

There is debate regarding the extent to which egocentric distance versus a more interactional approach underpin the use of spatial demonstratives across languages. This study experimentally tested the influence of object distance from a speaker and two dynamic speech-situation related parameters – position of an interlocutor, and the one who placed the object referred to – on adnominal demonstrative pronoun choice in two very close kindred languages: Estonian and Võro. These languages are spoken in the same geographical region and are closely related yet have different demonstrative systems. Our results confirmed the influence of egocentric distance on the choice of adnominal demonstrative pronouns in both languages, but the influence of two more interactional factors was found only in Võro. These results highlight the importance of egocentric distance underlying the use of demonstratives in a spatial context but also show that languages that are even closely related vary in the extent to which additional parameters affect dedmonstrative choice.

Interpreting Estonian Demonstratives: The Effects of Referent’s Distance and Visual Salience

“…In other words, when the referent was situated in the participant's extrapersonal space-the space outside one's grasping distance (di Pellegrino and Làdavas, 2015)-then distal demonstratives were used in referring to that object. Similar results have been found for other languages as well, such as Estonian and Võro language (Reile et al, 2020). In addition, in English, when an object is referred to with a distal demonstrative, then its location is remembered to be more distant than it actually was (Gudde et al, 2016).…”

“…Note that the text boxes (FB, MB, and NB, referring to the farthest, middle, and nearest brick, respectively) were not presented to the participants on the screen during the experiment. Reile et al, 2020). This means that, in each of the pictures, the bricks were located either in the supposed peripersonal space of the participant (i.e., near to the participant, henceforth near space) or outside of it (i.e., far from the participant, henceforth far space) (see Figure 1).…”

“…In this demonstrative pronoun system, see is the proximal and too is the distal demonstrative pronoun. However, too has a stronger anchorage to far distance than see to near distance (Reile, 2019;Reile et al, 2020). As in the one-term system, demonstrative pronouns can be accompanied by demonstrative adverbs also in the two-term system (see Table 1).…”

“…Previous studies on the production of Estonian demonstratives have shown that, while distance has a straightforward effect on the choice of Estonian demonstratives (Reile et al, 2019(Reile et al, , 2020, the effect of visual salience might manifest itself in a more indirect way, that is, rather than influencing the choice between distal or proximal demonstratives, the position of demonstrative adverbs in the word order of a referential utterance is affected (Reile, 2016). In other words, in referring to visually non-salient referents, the distal demonstrative adverb seal-"there" precedes the referential Demonstrative pronouns see-"this"/that" see-"this" too-"that"…”

Demonstratives in Spatial Language and Social Interaction: An Interdisciplinary Review

“…The results were replicated in several follow-up studies with speakers of other languages under somewhat different experimental conditions (cf. Coventry et al, 2014 ; Gudde et al, 2016 ; Caldano and Coventry, 2019 ; Reile et al, 2020 ). Other evidence supporting a distance-based analysis of demonstrative reference comes from an EEG experiment by Stevens and Zhang (2013) and a behavioral study by Bonfiglioli et al (2009) .…”