AUTHOR=Buchholz Timo , von Heusinger Klaus 

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

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Communication

VOLUME=9

YEAR=2024

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/communication/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2024.1369290

DOI=10.3389/fcomm.2024.1369290

ISSN=2297-900X

ABSTRACT=<p>German has two demonstrative pronoun series: the short form <italic>der</italic>, <italic>die</italic>, <italic>das</italic>, and the long form <italic>dieser</italic>, <italic>diese</italic>, <italic>dieses</italic>. Both forms can be used anaphorically, and they contrast with the personal pronouns <italic>er</italic>, <italic>sie</italic>, <italic>es</italic> in that they refer to an antecedent that is less prominent at that point in the discourse when the discourse provides different potential antecedents. Demonstrative pronouns are typically used in the preverbal position in a German sentence, i.e., the topic position. Thus, they are assumed to be topic shifters (from a non-topical antecedent to the topical argument in the current sentence). However, <italic>der</italic> can be repeated, yielding topic chains, thus referring back to a topical antecedent, while this is not the case for <italic>dieser</italic>. In this article, we argue that <italic>der</italic> and <italic>dieser</italic> both contribute to topic management, but they do this in different ways: <italic>der</italic> is a marker of a sentence topic, while <italic>dieser</italic> is a marker of discourse topic shift. We present the results of two experiments that compare the use of personal pronouns with either demonstrative pronoun manipulating sentence topic or discourse topic. First, both experiments show that the personal pronoun is not sensitive to either type of topichood of its antecedent. Second, Experiment 1 shows that both demonstrative pronouns prefer a context where discourse topic and sentence topic are shifted. Third, Experiment 2 shows that only <italic>dieser</italic> prefers a context with a shifted discourse topic, but <italic>der</italic> is not sensitive to discourse topichood alone. We take the results as supporting our claim that the two demonstratives have different discourse functions: <italic>der</italic> marks a sentence topic, while <italic>dieser</italic> is a shifter (and marker) of the discourse topic.</p>