Empirical Studies on the Use of Hungarian Demonstratives
Empirical Perspectives on the Use of Hungarian Nominal Demonstratives - Enikő Tóth
Enikő Tóth [+]
University of Debrecen
Description
Chapter 3 reports the results of two empirical studies conducted to explore demonstrative practice in Hungarian. First, I collected spontaneous data in a controlled dialogue game setting in order to examine the use of Hungarian nominal demonstratives. The findings indicated that relative distance from the speaker acts as a decisive factor in the choice of (exophoric) demonstratives, but mental accessibility as a factor is discarded. At the same time, the outcome of the qualitative analysis also emphasized that the role of dynamic features of interaction (such as change of perspective, direction of eye gaze) cannot be neglected. The second study investigated the effect of three factors – relative distance, joint visual attention,and pointing – on the choice of demonstratives with the help of an online production experiment. The results showed that the selection between proximal and distal demonstratives in Hungarian is influenced by relative distance from the speaker; however, it was also shown that relative distance as a single factor cannot always explain the selection of demonstratives; visual joint attention, and pointing are crucial. Moreover, the interaction found between distance and joint attention signalled that it is not enough to examine isolated factors, studying the interactions between individual factors is essential, too.