6.799, Sum: 'this' and 'that'

[The Linguist List]

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-6-799. Fri 09 Jun 1995. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 253
 
Subject: 6.799, Sum: 'this' and 'that'
 
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1)
Date: Thu, 8 Jun 1995 09:54:05 +0900
From: kmatsum at tooyoo.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Subject: Sum: 'this' and 'that'
 
-------------------------Messages--------------------------------------
1)
Date: Thu, 8 Jun 1995 09:54:05 +0900
From: kmatsum at tooyoo.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Subject: Sum: 'this' and 'that'
 
Dear colleagues:
 
Last week I sent a query to this list asking you about the fomral
opposition between 'this' and 'that' in the demonstratives (June 4,
6.772, Qs: 'This', ...). I have received 26 responses by now, and
so think it necessary to compile a quick summary today as I will be
away from Tokyo for more than two weeks starting tomorrow.
 
The original text of my query was as follows:
 
    Some present-day 'European' languages have only one set of simple
    demonstratives and the opposition of (this) vs. <that> is expressed
    by the help of (here) and <there>:
 
      French    ceci      'this'    ce livre-ci     'this book'
                cela      'that'    ce livre-l`a    'that book'
 
      Swedish   det ha"r  'this'    den ha"r bilen  'this car'
                det da"r  'that'    den da"r bilen  'that car'
 
      Estonian  see siin  'this'    see maja siin   'this house'
                see seal  'that'    see maja seal   'that house'
 
    My Sweidish-German dictionary (Stora tyska ordboken) gives (der hier)
    and (der da) as colloquial (familia"r, umgangssprachlich) German forms
    which conrrespond to (den ha"r) and <den da"r>, respectively.
 
    How common is a demonstrative system like this?
 
    Incidentally, Japanese has a rather sophisticated three-way distinction
    here:
 
      kono hoN  'this book (you see here)'
      sono hoN  'that book (you see there), the book (under discussion)'
      ano  hoN  'that book (you see over there)'
 
    So I'm afraid I will have to convince my students that the Japanese
    are extravagant even in the way of using demonstratives.
 
Though the last paragraph was intended as an allusion to the way Japanese
tourists spend money overseas, quite a few people, both Japanese and non-
Japanese, took it seriously and tried to convince me that the Japanese
language (sic!) was by no means "extravagant" because it was not alone in
having a three-way distinction in the demonstratives. Some even drew my
attention to the existence of a language with a five-way distinction. I
thank them for the examples of various demonstrative systems they sent me,
but this is not the point I wanted to discuss.
 
Perhaps I should have stated explicitly that I was interested in the
morphology of demonstrative pronouns/adjectives. It is very important
that French, for instance, has one basic demonstrative pronoun-adjective,
i.e. (ce), on the morph-lexical level, and that the speaker of French may
optionally add an element meaning either (here) or <there> in order to
make finer distinctions (ce livre-ci, cette table-l'a). In Japanese,
however, there's no single basic demonstrative pronoun-adjective like (ce)
in French: the speaker of Japanese must always choose one from the set of
three lexically distinct demonstrative forms.
 
This is a big difference, and puzzels many of my students in my Estonian
syntax class.
 
Here are the responses which I think have direct relevance to my interest:
 
------------------------------------
I imagine that your posting was a bit abbreviated, so did not mention
the Swedish demonstratives denna/detta/dessa and den/det/de, which
in any case are grammatically correct but not usual in conversational
speech ("den tiden," "det aaret," "de fraagorna").  One would expect
Danish and Norwegian to be similar in this regard to Swedish, but
unfortunately I have little information to contribute.  While Danish
does has both den/det/de and so on plus the option of adding "der"
("Tag den bog," "Naer saa du de mennesker?"; "Hvad er det der?",
"Jeg tager dem (der)"), I'm not certain whether usage is quite the
same, that is, whether the "den der" forms predominate as they do
in Swedish.
[...]
Certain dialects of American English do use "this here" and "that
there," as attested by the way schoolteachers warn their students
not to use those expressions.  They're nonstandard and are regarded
as uneducated usages, though I suspect that they actually come from
older dialects of British descent in which they were acceptable.
                             -- Brian White (BFWHITE at watson.ibm.com)
 
--
The use of compund demonstratives is indeed common in my own mother tongue,
Norwegian, and I believe in all 'Scandinavian' languages, ie Norwegian,
Danish and Swedish. I feel that it is a feature of colloquial speech, and I
would be surprised to find it in (formal) writing. In fast speech the
distinction between the two demonstratives tends to be lost, at least in my
own dialect (Bergen, Western Norway):
 
        den her bilen   ----)  'denner bilen'   (this car)
        den der bilen   ----)  'denner bilen'   (that car)
 
Moreover, Norwegian (and, I believe, Swedish + Danish) has the distinctions:
 
        den bilen vs denne bilen   (that car vs this car; Masc.)
        det huset vs dette huset  (that house vs this house; Neu.)
 
which seem to correspond closely to this/that in English, and are perfectly
acceptable in written and spoken Norwegian.
                             -- Gisle Andersen (Gisle.Andersen at eng.uib.no)
 
--
As a native speaker, I would not really use (der hier) even colloquial,
(der da) is possible, an would more likely contrast with <der dort>,
which implies that (der da) goes along with <this> and not with <that>!
But in general: it is always a problem for native speakers of German to
acquire the this/that distinction, as we do not draw the same
boundaries. Maybe, a more formal (in terms of the register) would be:
(dieses) (This) and <jenes> (that) -- this it at least what I use in
translations (and also what my German/English dictionary advises me to
do - but never trust a dictionary). Actually, we do not use (jenes) very
much, it goes along with very formal speech and maybe even old-
fashioned.          -- Gertraud Benke (gertraud at leland.stanford.edu)
 
--
ENGLISH COLLOQUIALLY, ESP. BLACK ENG. VERNACULAR, USES 'THIS HERE'
AND 'THAT THERE.'   'THIS BOOK HERE' VS. 'THIS BOOK THERE' SOUNDS
PERFECTLY NORMAL, WHILE 'THIS HERE BOOK' AND 'THAT THERE BOOK' SOUND
MOSTLY LIKE AMERICAN ENGLISH FROM THE SOUTH-EAST PORTION OF THE U.S.
                                    -- Tim Beasley (tbeasley at ucla.edu)
 
--
You might be interested to know that many dialects of English
(Appalachian US, and therefore some British dialects as well) have a
similar opposition to the one you're talking about:
 
this here dog
that there dog
 
There is more than one demonstrative used, but the "here" and "there"
seem to be relics of some old Germanic usage.
                                  -- James Kirchner (JPKIRCHNER at aol.com)
 
--
In some dialects of British English (I'm not excluding other varieties but
I don't know them well enough) 'this here' and 'that there' are perfectly
acceptable
 
eg  'look at this here postcard that she sent me'
    'pick up that there bucket'
 
These are normal in my dialect
                                -- David Britain (dbritain at essex.ac.uk)
 
--
There is another funny case.  In colloquial English, you can say "this
here X" and "that there X".  In Greek, there is "afto edho" (usually
pronounced "aftodho") and "ekino eki" ("ekinoki") with the same
meaning. ("dh" = postdental fricative)
                                 -- Stavros Macrakis (macrakis at osf.org)
 
--
Interestingly, Afrikaans, as a Dutch-based creole, has developed 'hierdie'
(litt. 'here-that') for 'this', whereas Dutch itself has no such system,
using simply 'deze' for 'this' and 'die' for 'that'.
                              -- Henk Wolf (H.A.Y.Wolf at stud.let.ruu.nl)
 
--
I am not sure I understand the question correctly, but in Italian (northern
Italian at least) you can say
 
questo qui -or- questo qua (this here)  instead of "questo"
quello li' -or- quello la' (that there) instead of "quello"
 
These are both colloquial forms. I cannot really say whether they are used
in other parts of Italy.
                                 -- Anna Mazzoldi (mazzoldi at iol.ie)
 
--------------------------------
 
It seems that with a few execptions (Italian dialects, Greek), the
phenomenon seems characteristic of Germanic languages and languages
that have gone through strong Germanic influence (French, Estonian).
 
Note incidentally that Finnish, which is genetically closely related to
Estonian, is on the Japanese side, and that a similar split seems to
exist among the Romance languages as well. Interesting?
 
The others gave me examples of "richer" demonstrative systems. If you are
interested in those data, please ask me for a copy of the file which
contains all the responses in the unedited form.
 
My hearty thanks to the following people who have responded to my query:
 
    Philippe L. Valiquette (PHLCVALI at VM1.ulaval.ca)
    Gertraud Benke (gertraud at leland.stanford.edu)
    Brian White (BFWHITE at watson.ibm.com)
    Tim Beasley (tbeasley at ucla.edu)
    Adriano Paolo Palma (pyapp at sun22.ccunix.ccu.edu.tw)
    James Kirchner (JPKIRCHNER at aol.com)
    Eugene Loos (Eugene.Loos at sil.org)
    Murat Kural (IZZYFK6 at MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU)
    Derek Gowlett (GOWLETT at beattie.uct.ac.za)
    Jeff Allen (jhallen at indiana.edu)
    Merce (prat at cogsci.ed.ac.uk)
    Nino (N.Vessella at agora.stm.it)
    David Beck (DJBECK at UVVM.UVic.CA)
    Debra R West/Markell (markell at afterlife.ncsc.mil)
    Anna Mazzoldi (mazzoldi at iol.ie)
    Stavros Macrakis (macrakis at osf.org)
    Gisle Andersen (Gisle.Andersen at eng.uib.no)
    David Britain (dbritain at essex.ac.uk)
    Henk Wolf (H.A.Y.Wolf at stud.let.ruu.nl)
    Kiyoko Takahashi (gc610817 at netserv.chula.ac.th)
    Philippe Mennecier (ferry at cimrs1.mnhn.fr)
    David Parkinson (dp11 at cornell.edu)
    Anton Sherwood (dasher at netcom.com)
    (Nebiye.Kurtboeke at arts.monash.edu.au)
    Kirk Belnap (belnapk at yvax.byu.edu)
    Geoffrey S. Nathan (geoffn at siu.edu)
                                 (As of 09:30 JST June 8, 1995)
 
Best wishes
Kazuto
 
     Kazuto MATSUMURA
     kmatsum at tooyoo.L.u-tokyo.ac.jp
   -----------------------------------------------------------
     Institute for Cross-Cultural Studies (Tooyoo Gengo)
     Faculty of Letters, University of Tokyo
     Hongo 7-3-1, Bunkyo-ku, TOKYO 113   JAPAN
     tel. +81-3-5800-3754     fax: +81-3-5800-3740, 5803-2784
   -----------------------------------------------------------
 
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