Alumni College Fellow

Min-Joo Kim

Affective Uses of Demonstratives and Their Cross-Linguistic Variation

Every language has demonstratives (e.g., this/these, that/those) and they are among the very first words that children acquire. However, they exhibit tremendous cross-linguistic variation. For instance, English demonstratives may function as markers of solidarity markers, which is a type of affective use, but their corresponding expressions in Korean do not. This project examines demonstratives in English, Korean, German, and Japanese and shows that all demonstratives can be used affectively but they exhibit different properties because different languages may have different hearer-accommodation strategies and this is reflected in the pragmatics of deictic expressions.

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