Discourse genre predicts demonstrative use in text: Experimental evidence from Dutch and Mandarin

In written language, demonstratives such as this and that allow writers to produce coherent texts and readers to build up a consistent mental model of the message that is conveyed. But what makes a writer decide to use one demonstrative (e.g., this) over another (e.g., that)? Here we present experimental evidence, from both Dutch and Mandarin, that discourse genre is the main predictor of writers' demonstrative use in text. Specifically, the results of a text elicitation task show that expository texts mainly elicited proximal demonstratives (this, these, here) while narrative texts showed a significant increase in distal demonstrative (that, those, there) use. This finding is taken to reflect that writers mentally position textual referents in psychological proximity to themselves or to the reader as a function of the genre of their text.