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Discourse genre predicts demonstrative use in text: Experimental evidence from Dutch and Mandarin
Peeters,David Schuurman,Suzanne Zhai,Tianning Krahmer,Emiel Gu,Yan Maes,Alfons
Peeters,David
Schuurman,Suzanne
Zhai,Tianning
Krahmer,Emiel
Gu,Yan
Maes,Alfons
Abstract
In written language, demonstratives such as this and that allow writers to produce coherent texts and readers to build up a consistent mental model of the message that is conveyed. But what makes a writer decide to use one demonstrative (e.g., this) over another (e.g., that)? Here we present experimental evidence, from both Dutch and Mandarin, that discourse genre is the main predictor of writers' demonstrative use in text. Specifically, the results of a text elicitation task show that expository texts mainly elicited proximal demonstratives (this, these, here) while narrative texts showed a significant increase in distal demonstrative (that, those, there) use. This finding is taken to reflect that writers mentally position textual referents in psychological proximity to themselves or to the reader as a function of the genre of their text.
Description
Date
2025-12
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Keywords
Deixis, Demonstratives, Discourse genre, Experimental pragmatics, Reference
Citation
Peeters, D, Schuurman, S, Zhai, T, Krahmer, E, Gu, Y & Maes, A 2025, 'Discourse genre predicts demonstrative use in text : Experimental evidence from Dutch and Mandarin', Cognition, vol. 265, 106285. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106285