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

Abstract

Demonstratives such as this and that are among the most frequently used words in texts. But what are the factors that determine whether a writer uses one demonstrative form (proximal this) or another (distal that)? Here we report a large-scale corpus analysis in three written genres to empirically contrast theories based on differences in referent activation and prominence with a recent proposal suggesting that genre is the main driver of written demonstrative variance. We consistently observe that discourse genre is indeed the main predictor of writers’ demonstrative variation in English text. More specifically, a clear preference for distal demonstratives is found when the addressee is considered more prominent in the given discourse setting (as in news reports), whereas an overall preference for proximal demonstratives is observed when the knowledgeable writer feels more responsibility for the produced discourse themselves, as in an expository context (e.g. wikipedia texts). In such expository contexts, proximal demonstratives hence indicate that the referent is psychologically situated near the writer, whereas in interactional and narrative discourse the writer uses distal demonstratives to reach out to the addressee. These findings shed new theoretical light on some of the most frequently used and studied words in human language.