Effect of evaluative expressions on two types of demonstrative pronouns in German

Abstract

We propose a unified prominence-based account of the two paradigms of demonstrative pronouns in German: the die- and diese-paradigm. The two types of demonstrative pronouns have been shown to have similar referential preferences — avoiding the most prominent referent — but different language register and modality preferences — diese pronouns prefer formal language whereas die pronouns prefer informal language and the spoken modality. They also reveal different strengths in terms of referential shift and last-mentioned antecedent preference. We propose that the perspectival prominence-based account initially proposed by Hinterwimmer & Bosch (2016; 2017) for die pronouns can be extended to incorporate both demonstrative pronouns. Our extended proposal suggests that the perspectivally prominent discourse referent is the highest ranked element on the prominence scale only for die pronouns but not for diese pronouns, and that perspectival prominence can be modulated by evaluative expressions. For diese pronouns, on the other hand, the aboutness topic is the highest ranked discourse referent on the prominence scale and they are not influenced by evaluative expressions. We report two experiments to test our account. The experimental results largely support the predictions of the new unified account. 

German demonstrative pronouns differ in their sensitivity to discourse and sentence topics

“…Bader et al (2022, p. 415) do not find any structural or semantic differences between der and dieser, but speculate that der allows for an "evaluative" interpretation, which is not available for dieser. This is experimentally confirmed by Patil et al (2023), who find that der is acceptable in an evaluative context even when its antecedent is highly prominent (topical), whereas dieser is not affected by evaluation and is always rated low with such an antecedent. Patil et al (2023) use these findings to build upon a theory (cf.…”

“…This is experimentally confirmed by Patil et al (2023), who find that der is acceptable in an evaluative context even when its antecedent is highly prominent (topical), whereas dieser is not affected by evaluation and is always rated low with such an antecedent. Patil et al (2023) use these findings to build upon a theory (cf. Hinterwimmer andBosch, 2016, 2018, in turn developing an account by that der is sensitive to perspective-taking, and that it avoids the most prominent perspectivetaker.…”

“…4 In order to avoid confounds created by the effects of perspective-taking (cf. Hinterwimmer andBosch, 2016, 2018;Hinterwimmer, 2020;Patil et al, 2023), the narrations were all told from the perspective of a first-person narrator who was established as a participant in or immediate observer of the sequence of events and as a source of evaluative judgment, thus being the most prominent perspective-taker.…”

“…Hinterwimmer (2020) generalizes this account by assuming that perspective-takers such as narrators in texts are also discourse referents, and that thus the behavior of der simply falls out from it, avoiding the most prominent discourse referent. Dieser, Patil et al (2023) argue, is not sensitive to perspective-taking, but also avoids the most prominent discourse referent, which is then the discourse topic. Patterson and Schumacher (2021) found no significant difference between the use of der and dieser in forced-choice and acceptability judgment tasks of ambiguous contexts with three antecedents, but both showed a certain preference for the last mentioned antecedent, supporting the claim of Zifonun et al (1997) for dieser.…”

“…The demonstrative dieser has been less intensively studied, primarily using offline studies: Abraham (2002), Ahrenholz (2007, Weinert (2007) report on corpus studies, Fuchs and Schumacher (2020) from sentence completion tasks, Patil et al (2020Patil et al ( , 2023 and Patterson and Schumacher (2021) on forced-choice and acceptability judgment tasks. Summing up their findings, dieser behaves very similarly to der: in ambiguous contexts, i.e., in contexts with two or more antecedents, both demonstratives refer to the less prominent antecedent.…”