A Taxonomy of the Uses of English Demonstratives
Ryan Doran
University of Regina
Gregory Ward
Northwestern University
Abstract
While previous accounts of demonstrative NPs have identified a wide range of uses, there has been no comprehensive account that includes all of their felicitous uses (see Maclaran 1982, Kaplan 1989, King 2001, Roberts 2002, Elbourne 2008, Wolter 2009 inter alia). In this paper, we present a taxonomy of the various uses of demonstratives and provide a basis for classifying these uses based on a large corpus of naturally-occurring data.
We take as our starting point the full range of uses of the English demonstratives, whether used as pronominal NPs or as determiners of lexical NPs. Our taxonomy identifies a total of 14 distinct uses of demonstrative NPs on the basis of two factors. First, we began by considering the semantic value of the demonstrative, i.e. whether the speaker is using the demonstrative to denote or refer to an entity, a kind, a predicate, or a variable in a quantificational domain. Second, further divisions are made on the basis of various pragmatic factors that influence how the relevant value for the demonstrative is assigned in context. Representative examples of the taxonomy are shown in (1)-(4):
1. Reference to Discourse Entities
Deictic uses (including discourse deixis)
a. That cake is delicious.
Anaphoric uses
b. There are some nice strawberries in the fridge but I was saving those for dessert.
Cataphoric uses
c. This is what you should do: leave him.
Uses based on private shared knowledge
d. There were those neighbors at the City Council meeting yesterday.
Inferrable uses
e. John is worried about moving to the south and picking up that drawl.
‘Indefinite’ this use
f. There was this funny rattle under the hood.
2. Reference to Kinds and other generic uses
Taxonomic, kind-referring uses
a. Those dogs make great pets. [referring to a particular breed of dog]
Non-taxonomic, kind-referring uses
b. Those Labradors make great pets.
Uses involving exemplars of identifiable kinds
c. Looking for that perfect gift?
Stereotypical uses with proper names
d. Oh, that Justin Bieber is getting into trouble again.
3. Predicative Use
a. Do you know Joan? She’s this lawyer.
4. Quantificational Uses
Bound variable uses with explicit links
a. Mary talked to no senator before that senator was lobbied.
Bound variable uses with inferential links
b. Every professor cherishes that dissertation.
Restrictive that uses
c. Those who know drink Don Julio.
In providing this taxonomy, we assemble the full range of demonstrative uses in English and provide a basis for identifying common features among their various uses.
References
Elbourne, Paul 2008. Demonstratives as individual concepts. Linguistics and Philosophy 31(4): 409-466.
Kaplan, David 1989a. Demonstratives. In J. Almog, J. Perry and H. Wettstein, (eds.), Themes from Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 481-563.
King, Jeffery C. 2001. Complex Demonstratives. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Maclaran, Rose 1982. The Semantics and Pragmatics of the English Demonstratives. Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University.
Roberts, Craige 2002. Demonstratives as definites. K. van Deemter and R. Kibble (eds.), Information Sharing: Reference and Presupposition in Language Generation and Interpretation. Stanford: CSLI, 89-136.
Wolter, Lynsey 2009. Demonstratives in philosophy and linguistics. Philosophy Compass 4(3): 451-468.