Understanding demonstrative reference in text: a new taxonomy based on a new corpus

Abstract

Endophoric demonstratives such as this and that are among the most frequently used words in written texts. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how exactly they should be subdivided and classified in terms of their different types of use. Here, we develop a new taxonomy of endophoric demonstratives based on a large-scale corpus including three written genres: news items, encyclopedic texts, and book reviews. The taxonomy enables analysts to reliably code endophoric demonstratives based on objectively applicable criteria, while at the same time making them aware of many subtle borderline cases. We consider the taxonomy as a theoretical foundation for future theoretical and empirical work into endophoric demonstratives, and as an analytical tool allowing researchers to unify and compare the results of studies on endophoric demonstratives coming from different genres and languages.

Explaining variance in writers’ use of demonstratives: A corpus study demonstrating the importance of discourse genre

“…Although these two main classes roughly represent what traditionally has been termed anaphoric vs. deictic respectively (e.g., Diessel 1999;Levinson 2004), we will not use these notions in this sense, as we consider all demonstratives (situation-based and text-based demonstratives, demonstrative pronouns and demonstrative NPs) deictic (cf. Maes et al 2022). As we see it, all text-based demonstratives need the deictic or marked force of a demonstrative (as compared to a regular pronoun or definite NP), either to guarantee successful referent identification, or to create additional inferences.…”

“…In line with recent theoretical work, we make a basic distinction between text-based and situationbased endophoric demonstratives in written discourse (cf. Maes et al 2022; see Figure 1 below).…”

“…The current corpus study aims at identifying the variables responsible for the writer's choice between proximal and distal endophoric demonstratives in English. As our corpus, we use all text-based demonstratives (n = 2232) from the corpus selected and coded in Maes et al (2022), see also Figure 1. This corpus consists of three different, common genres of written discourse: a corpus of written news reports, an encyclopedic wikipedia corpus, and a corpus of written product reviews.…”

“…Competition is less relevant as a coding variable here, as endophoric demonstratives hardly occur in situations (typical for exophoric demonstrative use) in which there are two or more competing referents (Maes 1996;Maes et al 2022). Unity between referent and antecedent (i.e.…”

Sémiotique des démonstratifs cataphoriques

“…3 Intitulé Retour(s) sur la cataphore (Strasbourg, 2-3 juin 2022). 4 Développées, entre autres, par Cornish (2007Cornish ( , 2011Cornish ( , 2017Cornish ( et 2021b, Vanderbauwhede (2012aVanderbauwhede ( , 2012b, Diessel et Coventry (2020), Doran et Ward (2019), Maes, Krahmer et Peeters (2022), Peeters, Krahmer et Maes (2021), Peeters et Özyürek (2016), Sidnell et Enfield (2017), etc. 5 L' entreprise est plus que légitime, dans la mesure où la cataphore n'a pas connu un développement continu semblable à celui qu'a connu l'anaphore. On en est généralement resté, en ce qui concerne le français du moins, aux résultats mis en relief par les recherches effectuées durant la période 1980-2010, desquelles émerge avant tout l' ouvrage de Kesik (1989), qui est la seule monographie consacrée à la cataphore.…”