{"pk":24305,"title":"German demonstratives and topic questions","subtitle":null,"abstract":"German has two demonstrative series, the der (die, das) series and the dieser (diese, dieses) series. Both have been claimed to be topic shifters, taking up a non-topical antecedent and promoting it to topichood. However, der can form topical referential chains, while dieser cannot. We operationalize discourse topichood via questions and provide evidence from a corpus study and an acceptability study that while dieser is indeed sensitive to topichood and avoids topical antecedents, der is compatible with topical antecedents. We hypothesize that only dieser is a discourse topic shifter, while der marks a sentence topic.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Linguistics; Attention; Discourse; Language Production; Language understanding"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7vd8g5rb","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Timo","middle_name":"","last_name":"Buchholz","name_suffix":"","institution":"Universität zu Köln","department":""},{"first_name":"Klaus","middle_name":"","last_name":"von Heusinger","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Cologne","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T12:00:00-06:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24305/galley/13901/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24305/galley/21209/download/"}]}