Production of Demonstratives in Dutch, English and Portuguese dialogues

A data elicitation study on the type of demonstrativesand determiners selected to denoteobjects in English, Dutch and Portuguese dialoguesis presented. Participants were givena scenario and a scripted dialogue in whicha furniture seller identifies target objects toa buyer. They were then asked to choose acombination of a determiner or demonstrativeand a referring expression to be uttered by theseller and told that the agent would point atthe targets while uttering the chosen linguisticdescriptions. The study was conducted withnative speakers and rendered a total of 920demonstratives and determiners. It focusedon accessibility of the target referents anddistance between agents and target referents.Results show that the three language groupslargely agree in their preferences and, in contrastto previous work, align with a nearby/faraway distinction