Abstract
This study will explore, analyze, and compare the usage of German and Chinese demonstratives. Discourse and textual uses of the forms will be considered as well as their locative and temporal uses.
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Notes
- 1.
This structure, however, is limited to concrete nouns in the spoken language. An abstract noun, such as Begriff “concept” or Idee “idea,” does not qualify for this structure in light of the fact that abstract nouns do not exist physically and thus cannot be perceived as either near or far from the speaker.
- 2.
In both the German and the Chinese examples which follow, we will first give the forms of the language under study in the utterance or sentence in question. Under that, we will provide a word-for-word (or morpheme-for-morpheme) gloss. In the case of German, this amount of information will usually be enough for the reader. In the case of Chinese, in contrast, it will sometimes be necessary to add an additional idiomatic English translation. In the final version of the book, the Chinese examples will also be given in the Chinese character-based writing system; but for now, to keep things simple, we will present them only in the Pinyin Romanization.
We should also note that the grammaticality judgments were obtained by asking four native German speakers (UCLA teaching assistants) to rate the examples. The author of this book the source of the grammaticality judgments for Chinese.
- 3.
While a distinction between * and ? can be made, for this thesis, I only requested that my informants make the distinction between “natural” and “unnatural.”
- 4.
The words are underlined in order to show that they are the referents of the Chinese demonstratives.
- 5.
The official translation of Qian (1954).
- 6.
This survey was done in December 2012 among English native speakers (faculty and staff) at the lycée français in Los Angeles.
- 7.
The following examples and explanations belong to Robert Kirsner: Compare the English expression Look closely, in which claiming the relevance to the communication of nearness tells the hearer to concentrate his or her attention on the intended referent. Furthermore, there is no converse term. (While two members of a large family can be either closely related or distantly related, there is no command * Look distantly.) That communicating precision of location, in turn, suggests nearness and hence that the two concepts are related is shown by the sentences The pole is near you, The pole is far from you, The pole is right near you versus * The pole is right far from you.
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Lin, L. (2020). Introduction. In: The German Demonstratives. Peking University Linguistics Research, vol 2. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8558-2_1
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