| The use of demonstratives in telephone
conversations
Words like “deze”
(“this”) and “die” (“that”) are
part of a group of words called demonstratives. Demonstratives may
refer to objects within a text or to objects inside an accessible
world. Moreover, demonstratives can be classified as proximal or
distal, i.e. in folk language respectively indicated as nearby and
far away. In this talk we will investigate the criteria for using
one of the two forms in dialogue. It will be shown that the
nearby/far away distinction is insufficient to explain the semantics
of those forms, and therefore, cannot be used as an unambiguous
criterion to choose one of the two forms in a language generation
application. It will also be shown that there are a couple of
different clues, leading to believe importance may be a significant
difference in meaning between proximals and distals.
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