Production of demonstratives in Dutch, English and Portuguese dialogues

A data elicitation study on the type of demonstratives and determiners selected to denote objects in English, Dutch and Portuguese dialogues is presented. Participants were given a scenario and a scripted dialogue in which a furniture seller identifies target objects to a buyer. They were then asked to choose a combination of a determiner or demonstrative and a referring expression to be uttered by the seller and told that the agent would point at the targets while uttering the chosen linguistic descriptions. The study was conducted with native speakers and rendered a total of 920 demonstratives and determiners. It focused on accessibility of the target referents and distance between agents and target referents. Results show that the three language groups largely agree in their preferences and, in contrast to previous work, align with a nearby/far away distinction.