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Anaphora, Pragmatics And Style In German, Helga H. Delisle

UTA Working Papers in Linguistics

German uses two sets of anaphoric pronouns, the personal pronoun set (PP) er, sie, es and the demonstrative pronoun set (DP) der, die, das. The latter set has been largely neglected in the literature, possibly because it mainly occurs in informal conversations. In this paper, I will investigate how a basic concept like the deictic one is exploited for various functions, and to what extent these functions are integrated into the different styles of spoken and written German. It will be shown that the DP is used by the speaker to signal to the hearer not only referential but also …