Demonstrative pronouns

A demonstrative pronoun is a pronoun with deictic content: the participant sets of the referents in whose vicinity it locates its referent. Harbour finds that the deixis of objects and spaces attests the five partitions of person and, as far as he has found, no others, so the content is a cell of one of them, as a person value's Person.participantSets is. English this covers the sets containing the speaker and that the others. Catalan aquest covers every set with a participant and aquell the empty one. Latin hic, iste, ille separate the speaker's, the addressee's and the others' spaces, and French ce, which makes no deictic contrast, covers every set. What makes a form a demonstrative is this content and not its traditional label: Patel-Grosz and Grosz argue that German der, die, das, traditionally called demonstrative pronouns, are personal pronouns built on the strong article that encode no deixis, so they are PersonalPronouns here (Studies/PatelGroszGrosz2017.lean), whereas Harbour treats stressed der as a demonstrative without a deictic contrast.

Main definitions

• DemonstrativePronoun: a pronoun with its deictic content.
• DemonstrativePronoun.toWord: its token, of UD pronoun type Dem.

References

• Harbour 2016, Impossible Persons formalized
• Terenghi 2023, Missing Person: Structure and change in Romance demonstratives formalized
• Patel-Grosz & Grosz 2017, Revisiting Pronominal Typology formalized