Text-type, context and demonstrative choice in written Dutch: Some experimental data
Robert Scott Kirsner, Vincent J. van Heuven, Jos Vermeulen · Text and Talk · 1987
Fifty Dutch native Speakers were asked to identify the original demonstrative in sentences in which all adjectival occurrences of'deze' 'this/these' and 'die' 'that/those' had been uniformly replaced with.the string '***'.First, the results suggest that native Speakers know which genres of written Dutch have the highest frequency of each demonstrative.Second, on average, onty the identiflcation of 'deze' improved when the sentences were presented in their original context -a result which accords with earlier studies (Kirsner, 1979;Kirsner and van Heuven, 1980, 1986) showing that 'deze' 'retrieves' previously mentioned entities over longer referential distances (cf.Givön, 1983) than 'die'.The results for the individual test-sentences show that other factors contributing to an increase of correct identiflcation of 'deze' in context are (a) Information in the context about either the referent or the Speaker's attitude towards it, and (b) Information within the test-sentences themselves provided by verb-tense and lexicon.That this particular düster of factors should influence demonstrative choice lends credence to the view of 'deze' äs instructing the addressee more forcefully than 'die' to seek out and attend to the noun 's referent.