In many languages, demonstrative expressions such as German der, dieser, jener and English this and that have – in addition to their familiar deictic uses – anaphoric uses, on which they refer to objects introduced not in the utterance situation, but rather in the preceding discourse. In recent years increasing attention has been paid to these “anaphoric demonstratives” by formal, functional, computational and corpus linguistic researchers.

In this workshop we propose to investigate the properties of anaphoric demonstratives in a cross-linguistic and interdisciplinary setting, comparing them with other more prototypically anaphoric expressions, such as pronouns, reflexives, definite noun phrases and logophoric expressions and cataloguing their unique properties. We expect that a focussed study of anaphoric demonstratives will shed significant light on general processes of anaphoric reference, anaphora resolution, and the cross-linguistic variation in these processes.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: