Demonstratives as indicators of interactional focus: Spatial and social dimensions of Spanish esta and esa
-
Naomi Shin
,
Luis Hinojosa-Cantú
Abstract
This paper adopts a cognitive linguistic framework to explore the influence of spatial and social factors on the use of Spanish demonstratives esta ‘this’ and esa ‘that’. Twenty adult Spanish speakers in Monterrey, Mexico, were asked questions prompting the selection of puzzle pieces for placement in a 25-piece puzzle located in the shared space between the participant and an addressee. Although participants were not explicitly instructed to produce demonstratives, the need to identify specific puzzle pieces naturally elicited a total of 523 tokens of esta and esa. Analyses of the distribution of esta versus esa show that demonstratives are not used in a categorical manner to mark differences in physical space. Although participants tended to produce proximal esta for referents near the speaker, both esta and esa were used for referents further from the speaker and closer to the addressee. Participants’ demonstrative selection was also influenced by interaction type: intersubjective misalignment between speakers promoted the use of proximal esta, whereas intersubjective alignment promoted the use of distal esa. These results support the view that nominal grounding is an intersubjective activity. Physical and social factors jointly shape speakers’ construal of the developing co-constructed communicative event as a whole, leading to increasingly variable usage of demonstratives as the referent is more distant both spatially and intersubjectively from the speaker.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the participants in the study; Bettie Petersen for her help designing the puzzle task; Grant Berry for assistance with statistical analyses; the University of New Mexico Women in STEM Faculty Development Fund for supporting this research; as well as three anonymous reviewers and the editors of this journal for their excellent feedback, which helped us tremendously.
Appendix: Experimenter script: which-piece and misunderstanding questions
| Item number | Question type | Spanish version | English translation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Training | Training | Primero, vamos a montar el dinosaurio verde. ¿Qué piezas tienen el dinosaurio verde? | First, we are going to put together the green dinosaur. Which pieces have the green dinosaur? |
| 1. | Which-piece | ¿Qué pieza tiene su ojo? | Which piece has its eye? |
| 2. | Which-piece | ¿Cuál tiene el otro ojo? | Which one has its other eye? |
| 3. | Misunderstanding | ¿Esta? (researcher chooses wrong piece) | This one? |
| 4. | Which-piece | ¿Cuál tiene sus dientes? | Which one has its teeth? |
| 5. | Which-piece | ¿Cuál tiene su nariz? | Which one has its nose? |
| 6. | Misunderstanding | ¿Esta? (researcher chooses wrong piece) | This one? |
| 7. | Which-piece | Ahora vamos a encontrar las piezas con agua. ¿Ves el agua azul? ¿Qué pieza tiene agua? (3 possible; water piece #1) | Now we’re going to find the pieces with water. Do you see the blue water? Which piece has water? |
| 8. | Which-piece | Hay más piezas con agua. ¿Cuál deberíamos poner aquí? (water piece #2) | There are more pieces with water. Which one should we put here? |
| 9. | Misunderstanding | ¿Esta? (researcher chooses wrong piece) | This one? |
| 10. | Which-piece | ¿Cuál va aquí? (water piece #3) | Which one goes here? |
| 11. | Which-piece | Ahora tenemos un poco del dinosaurio marrón. ¿Qué pieza tiene su espalda? | Now we have a little bit of the brown dinosaur. Which piece has its back? |
| 12. | Misunderstanding | ¿Esta? (researcher chooses wrong piece) | This one? |
| 13. | Which-piece | ¿Cuál tiene sus piernas? | Which one has its legs? |
| 14. | Which-piece | ¿Cuál tiene su ojo? | Which one has its eye? |
| 15. | Misunderstanding | ¿Esta? (researcher chooses wrong piece) | This one? |
| 16. | Which-piece | ¿Cuál tiene el otro ojo? | Which one has the other eye? |
| 17. | Which-piece | ¿Ves que su cabeza tiene placas? ¿Qué pieza tiene su cabeza? (2 possible, head with spikes #1) | Do you see that the head has spikes? Which piece has its head? |
| 18. | Misunderstanding | ¿Esta? (researcher chooses wrong piece) | This one? |
| 19. | Which-piece | ¿Qué pieza va aquí? (referring to space where head with spikes #2 goes) | Which piece goes here? |
| 20. | Which-piece | ¿Qué pieza tiene su nariz? | Which piece has its nose? |
| 21. | Misunderstanding | ¿Esta? (researcher chooses wrong piece) | This one? |
| 22. | Which-piece | Ahora tenemos piezas con el dinosaurio rojo. ¿Qué pieza tiene sus ojos? | Now we have pieces with the red dinosaur. Which piece has its eyes? |
| 23. | Which-piece | ¿Qué pieza tiene su cuello? | Which piece has its neck? |
| 24. | Misunderstanding | ¿Esta? (researcher chooses wrong piece) | This one? |
| 25. | Which-piece | ¿Qué pieza tiene su cabeza? | Which piece has its head? |
| 26. | Which-piece | ¿Ves las hojas verdes? ¿Qué pieza tiene hojas? (4 possible with leaves, leaf #1) | Do you see the green leaves? Which piece has leaves? |
| 27. | Misunderstanding | ¿Esta? (researcher chooses wrong piece) | This one? |
| 28. | Which-piece | Hay más piezas con hojas. ¿Cuál quieres que yo ponga ahora? (leaf piece #2) | There are more pieces with leaves. Which one do you want me to put now? |
| 29. | Which-piece | Hay otras piezas con hojas. ¿Cuál quieres ahora? (leaf piece #3) | There are other pieces with leaves. Which do you want now? |
| 30. | Which-piece | ¿Cuál va aquí? (leaf piece #4) | Which one goes here? |
| 31. | Which-piece | ¿Cuál tiene los árboles? (2 pieces with trees, tree pieces #1) | Which piece has trees? |
| 32. | Misunderstanding | ¿Esta? (researcher chooses wrong piece) | This one? |
| 33. | Which-piece | ¿Qué otra pieza tiene árboles? (tree piece #2) | Which other piece has trees? |
| 34. | Which-piece | Sólo nos quedan dos piezas. ¿Cuál va aquí? | We have only two pieces left. Which one goes here? |
| 35. | Which-piece | ¿Cuál va aquí? | Which one goes here? |
References
Alonso, Martin. 1968. Gramática del español contemporáneo. Madrid: Guadarrame.Suche in Google Scholar
Anderson, Stephen R. & Edward L. Keenan. 1985. Deixis. In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, vol. 3, 259–308. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Suche in Google Scholar
Bartón, Kamil. 2019. MuMIn: Multi-Model Inference. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=MuMIn (accessed 13 August 2019).Suche in Google Scholar
Bates, Douglas, Martin Maechler, Ben Bolker & Steven Walker. 2015. Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67(1). 1–48. doi:10.18637/jss.v067.i01.Suche in Google Scholar
Bello, Andrés. 1847. Gramática de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los americanos. Tenerife: Aula de Culrura de Tenerife.Suche in Google Scholar
Birdsong, David, Libby M. Gertken & Mark Amengual. 2012. Bilingual Language Profile: An easy-to-use instrument to assess bilingualism. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. https://sites.la.utexas.edu/bilingual/ (accessed 6 January 2019).Suche in Google Scholar
Coventry, Kenny R., Berenice Valdés, Alejandro Castillo & Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes. 2008. Language within your reach: Near–far perceptual space and spatial demonstratives. Cognition 108. 889–895.10.1016/j.cognition.2008.06.010Suche in Google Scholar
Diessel, Holger. 1999. Demonstratives: Form, function, and grammaticalization. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/tsl.42Suche in Google Scholar
Diessel, Holger. 2006. Demonstratives, joint attention, and the emergence of grammar. Cognitive Linguistics 17(4). 463–489.10.1515/COG.2006.015Suche in Google Scholar
Diessel, Holger. 2013. Distance contrasts in demonstratives. In Matthew Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds.), The world atlas of language structures online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://wals.info/chapter/41 (accessed 14 June 2018).Suche in Google Scholar
Enfield, Nick J. 2003. Demonstratives in space and interaction: Data from Lao speakers and implications for semantic analysis. Language 79(1). 82–117.10.1353/lan.2003.0075Suche in Google Scholar
Fleiss, Joseph L. 1971. Measuring nominal scale agreement among many raters. Psychological Bulletin 76(5). 378–382.10.1037/h0031619Suche in Google Scholar
García, Erica C. 1975. The role of theory in linguistic analysis: The Spanish pronoun system. North Holland: Amsterdam.Suche in Google Scholar
Gutiérrez-Rexach, Javier. 2002. Demonstratives in context. In Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach (ed.), From words to discourse: Trends in Spanish semantics and pragmatics, 195–236. Oxford/New York: Elsevier.10.1163/9780585475295Suche in Google Scholar
Hottenroth, Priska-Monika. 1982. The system of local deixis in Spanish. In Jürgen Weissenborn & Wolfgang Klein (eds.), Here and there: Cross-linguistic studies on deixis and demonstration, 133–153. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/pb.iii.2-3.07hotSuche in Google Scholar
Jungbluth, Konstanze. 2003. Deictics in the conversational dyad. Findings in Spanish and some cross-linguistic outlines. In Friedrich Lenz (ed.), Deictic conceptualisation of space, time and person, 13–40. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/pbns.112.04junSuche in Google Scholar
Kemmerer, David. 1999. “Near” and “far” in language and perception. Cognition 73. 35–63.10.1016/S0010-0277(99)00040-2Suche in Google Scholar
Kirsner, Robert S. 1979. Deixis in discourse: an exploratory quantitative study of the modern Dutch demonstrative adjectives. In Talmy Givon (ed.), Syntax and semantics: Discourse and syntax, vol. 12, 355–375. New York: Academic Press.10.1163/9789004368897_016Suche in Google Scholar
Kirsner, Robert S. & Vincent J. Van Heuven. 1988. The significance of the demonstrative position in Modern Dutch. Lingua 76. 209–248.10.1016/0024-3841(88)90040-XSuche in Google Scholar
Kuhn, Max, Contributions from Jed Wing, Steve Weston, Andre Williams, Chris Keefer, Allan Engelhardt, Tony Cooper, Zachary Mayer, Brenton Kenkel and the R Core Team, and Michael Benesty, Reynald Lescarbeau, Andrew Ziem, Luca Scrucca, Yuan Tang, Can Candan & Tyler Hunt. 2019. Caret: Classification and Regression Training. R package version 6.0-71. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=caret (accessed 13 August 2019).Suche in Google Scholar
Landis, J. Richard & Gary G. Koch. 1977. The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics 33(1). 159–174.10.2307/2529310Suche in Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald. 2008. Cognitive grammar. A basic introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195331967.001.0001Suche in Google Scholar
Leonard, Robert. 1995. Deixis in Swahili: Attention meanings and pragmatic function. In Ellen Contini-Morava & Barbara Goldberg (eds.), Meaning as explanation: Advances in linguistic sign theory, 271–288. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Suche in Google Scholar
Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics, vols 1–2. New York: Cambridge University Press.Suche in Google Scholar
McHugh, Mary L. 2012. Interrater reliability: The kappa statistic. Biochemia Medica 2012 22(3). 276–282.10.11613/BM.2012.031Suche in Google Scholar
Nakagawa, Shinichi, Paul C. D. Johnson & Holger Schielzeth. 2017. The coefficient of determination R2 and intra-class correlation coefficient from generalized linear mixed-effects models revisited and expanded. Journal of the Royal Society Interface 14. 20170213. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2017.0213.10.1098/rsif.2017.0213Suche in Google Scholar
Peeters, David, Zeynep Azar & Asli Özyürek. 2014. The interplay between joint attention, physical proximity, and pointing gesture in demonstrative choice. In Paul Bello, Marcello Guarini, Marjorie McShane & Brian Scassellati (eds.), Proceedings of the 36th annual meeting of the cognitive science society (CogSci 2014), 1144–1149. Austin, Texas: Cognitive Science Society.Suche in Google Scholar
Peeters, David & Asli Özyürek. 2016. This and that revisited: A social and multimodal approach to spatial demonstratives. Frontiers in Psychology 7. 222. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00222.Suche in Google Scholar
Piwek, Paul, Robert-Jan Beun & Anita Cremers. 2008. “Proximal” and “distal” in language and cognition: Evidence from deictic demonstratives in Dutch. Journal of Pragmatics 40. 694–718.10.1016/j.pragma.2007.05.001Suche in Google Scholar
R Core Team. 2016. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Suche in Google Scholar
Rybarczyk, Magdalena. 2015. Demonstratives and possessives with attitude: An intersubjectively-oriented empirical study. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/hcp.51Suche in Google Scholar
Zulaica-Hernández, Iker. 2012. Temporal constraints in the use of demonstratives in Iberian Spanish. Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics 1/2. 195–234.10.7557/1.1.2.2350Suche in Google Scholar
© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Anger stinks in Seri: Olfactory metaphor in a lesser-described language
- Semantic differences between strong and weak verb forms in Dutch
- Frequency effects in the L2 acquisition of the catenative verb construction – evidence from experimental and corpus data
- English similarity predicates construe particular dimensions of similarity
- Demonstratives as indicators of interactional focus: Spatial and social dimensions of Spanish esta and esa
- Iconicity and systematicity in phonaesthemes: A cross-linguistic study
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Anger stinks in Seri: Olfactory metaphor in a lesser-described language
- Semantic differences between strong and weak verb forms in Dutch
- Frequency effects in the L2 acquisition of the catenative verb construction – evidence from experimental and corpus data
- English similarity predicates construe particular dimensions of similarity
- Demonstratives as indicators of interactional focus: Spatial and social dimensions of Spanish esta and esa
- Iconicity and systematicity in phonaesthemes: A cross-linguistic study
