1.1 Language register (formal vs. colloquial)

Since some German native speakers express the intuition that diese-demonstratives are used more often in formal texts such as in legal documents, we, apart from testing linguistic constraints, also wanted to test if variation in the formality of language use has any effect on the way diese-demonstratives are used. In the field of sociolinguistic variation, formality is considered as the main scale or the most important dimension along which the language register or style varies (Biber 1988; Heylighen & Dewaele 2002); formal and colloquial being the two extremes of the scale. Style is treated as a speaker internal constraint because the same speaker may use different styles depending on the internal or external conditions for language use, and a native speaker of a language is considered to be aware of variations in the language through formality:

“We may try to relate the level of formality chosen to a variety of factors: the kind of occasion; the various social, age, and other differences that exist between the participants; the particular task that is involved, e.g., writing or speaking; the emotional involvement of one or more of the participants; and so on. We appreciate that such distinctions exist when we recognize the stylistic appropriateness of What do you intend to do, your majesty? and the inappropriateness of Waddya intend doin’, Rex? [both emphases are from the original text]. While it may be difficult to characterize discrete levels of formality, it is nevertheless possible to show that native speakers of all languages control a range of stylistic varieties. It is also quite possible to predict with considerable confidence the stylistic features that a native speaker will tend to employ on certain occasions.” (Wardhaugh 2006: 51)

It has also been shown with empirical work that language users are aware of variations in formality at the sentence level (Lahiri et al. 2011) and also across different types of texts (Pavlick & Tetreault 2016). To quantify formality, Heylighen & Dewaele (2002) have proposed a measure, the Formality Score (F-score), based on the frequency of occurrence of various word categories in a document. They have shown that the F-score can be used to adequately classify documents into different genre across seven different languages. In applied domains such as natural language processing and artificial intelligence, various quantitative measures of formality have been used to automatically classify documents (Abu Sheikha & Inkpen 2010; Pavlick & Tetreault 2016).

On the experimental side, Ricks (2018) reports results from a questionnaire study which shows how the variation in register — formal, informal and ethnic — by electoral candidate can shape political opinions of voters. In their questionnaire, they played short audio excerpts of a political address to participants and asked them to rate their agreeability on a five-point Likert scale followed by open-ended questions about virtuousness of the speaker as a member of the parliament. The excerpts were either in formal Thai, informal Thai or in the Isan ethnic language. They found that the ethnic variety lead to stronger agreeability than the formal variety, and the informal and ethnic variations gave rise to higher relatedness with the speaker. At the perception level, language formality has also been shown to improve participants’ attention during online experiments (August & Reinecke 2019). In another exploratory sociophonetic study, Winter & Grawunder (2012) show that language formality modulates a number of vocal expressions in Korean. They show that when Korean speakers were asked to produce messages varying in formality of the situation, the speakers modulate their average fundamental frequency, pitch range, the speed of their speech and breath intake depending on the formality of the situation.

Interestingly, linguistic research with register has shown that register variation can license some syntactic constructions that are normally regarded as ungrammatical. For example, subject drop in (3b), although considered ungrammatical in usual speech, is grammatical in reduced written register such as recipes (Haegeman 2013). Such register specific subject drop in English and French is also proposed to be analysed using core grammatical principles (Haegeman 2013), whereas, register specific object drop in English is proposed to be analysed by assuming register specific lexicon (Weir 2017). However, linguistic research on register is mostly confined to formal analyses. We are not aware of any experimental work where formality or other dimension of language register is explicitly manipulated to test if it induced differential linguistic responses from native speakers. For our research goal, it is necessary that we explicitly vary formality and test if it has any effect on the acceptability of diese-demonstratives.

In our experiments, to manipulate formality, we operationalized language register by exposing native speakers to text written in either formal or informal language. If the intuitions of native speakers about the “formality” of German diese-demonstratives are reliable, we expect to see its effect in their judgments. Since, the goal of this paper is also to test if the subject-avoidance constraint observed for relatively well studied die-demonstratives holds for diese-demonstratives, the other manipulation was in terms of available antecedents. Eventually it would be interesting to find out if the prominence-avoidance constraint on die-demonstratives is also applicable to diese-demonstratives, but here we restrict ourselves only to one of the prominence-lending cues, namely subjecthood.

In the next section we report two forced-choice studies that test the effect of language register between experiments and compare subject vs. object antecedent preference of the two demonstratives within each experiment. In light of the results from these two experiments, we motivate a design for another forced-choice study that evaluates the claim from Zifonun et al. (1997) that diese-demonstratives prefer the last mentioned entity as the antecedent.

2.2 Predictions

For the two experimental factors our main predictions for dieser-demonstratives are: (i) if language formality is a valid constraint, we expect diese-demonstratives to be chosen overall more often in Expt. 1a than in Expt. 1b, and (ii) if dieser-demonstratives avoid subject antecedents exactly the way die-demonstratives have been observed in earlier studies, we expect dieser-demonstratives to be chosen more often with object antecedent than with subject antecedent in comparisons B and C. Moreover, as a side effect, we expect to replicate earlier finding with die-demonstratives — they should be chosen more often with object antecedent than with subject antecedent in comparisons A and C.

2.3 Results

The response percentages for each option across all comparisons and conditions are listed in Table 1 (see Figure A1 in the Appendix for a visual representation of this table in terms of barplots). Plots summarising combined proportion of responses for each option across different comparisons are displayed in Figure 1. Results of data analysis are listed in Table 2.³ Next we summarise the results while referring to these two tables and the plots.

Figure 1

The plots represent responses to the forced-choice options. Each bar shows the percentage of choosing that option (and the confidence interval calculated using prop.test() function in R) across all comparisons where it was one of the alternatives in that language register; for example, the two dark grey bars in panel (i) represent the percentages of choosing diese-demonstratives option in comparisons B and C of Expt. 1a. Note that the percentages reflect the proportions of the number of times an option was chosen and the number of times it was available across all comparisons. That means although for the ‘neither’ option the numbers look small, it was chosen a lot more often, but then ‘neither’ was also available a lot more often because it was always the third option along with two pronouns. For percentages in each comparison refer to Table 1 and Figure A1 in the Appendix.

Diese-demonstratives were used more often with object antecedents and in formal register in both, B and C, comparisons. In comparison B we also found compelling evidence for the interaction between antecedent type and formality, but it should also be noted that diese-demonstratives were rarely used in the informal register.

In comparison A, die-demonstratives were preferred with the object antecedents but they showed no effect of language register, in fact, they were used very rarely in general. In comparison C, die-demonstratives were never used in formal register but were used fairly often in informal register, and also more often with object antecedent.⁴ However, since for comparison C we kept die-demonstrative and ‘neither’ responses as the reference level to test the effects on diese-demonstrative, it was not possible to statistically also check the effect of register and antecedent type on die-demonstratives.

As far as the predictors for trial number and the gender of the pronoun are concerned, there was no compelling evidence for the effect of trial, but the gender of the pronoun seemed to have an effect in comparisons A and B — feminine die-demonstratives were used more often than masculine ones in A, whereas, masculine diese-demonstratives were used more often than feminine ones in B.

2.4 Discussion

The results of the experiment support the intuition that diese-demonstratives require the formal language register to license their use. Moreover, when diese-demonstratives are used they prefer object antecedents over subject antecedents — a subject-avoidance preference that has been observed with die-demonstratives in the past research. These two constraints interacted in our experiments and we observed that the effect of subject-avoidance was much stronger in formal register. But since diese-demonstratives were used very rarely in informal register, even with object antecedents, the effect of formality is possibly much stronger.

Although the main purpose of the experiment was to test preferences of diese-demonstratives, as a control, we contrasted their behavior with die-demonstratives which have been studied more often in the past. With die-demonstratives we expected to replicate the object preference. The statistical analysis provided evidence for object preference, but since die-demonstratives were used so rarely we suggest that this effect is possibly not reliable. However, in comparison C we did see strong numerical trend suggesting an effect of register — die-demonstratives preferred in informal language over formal, and a possible effect of subject-avoidance. Since our priority here was of testing effects on diese-demonstratives, we had to keep the die-demonstrative responses as the reference level and hence the numerical trends we observed for die-demonstratives in comparison C could not be statistically tested. Effectively, we imply that our data weakly supported the subject-avoidance hypothesis for die-demonstratives and suggested a possibility of die-demonstratives preferring informal language.

A possible explanation for the absence of this effect could be that demonstrative pronouns from the die paradigm are dispreferred in the written modality, they are more common in the spoken modality (Ahrenholz 2007; Bosch et al. 2007). Portele & Bader (2016) have also observed in their corpus study and completion experiment that, even in an environment where die-demonstratives should be favoured, they were used less often than personal pronouns (see also the results from acceptability studies in Hinterwimmer & Patil (2019) that show similar effects of written modality on die- and diese-demonstratives). This result is also consistent with Weinert (2011) who notes that in spoken language demonstratives are used equally frequently (and are equally important) as personal pronouns but in written language demonstratives are dispreferred.

One interesting pattern that we observed in comparison C was that diese-demonstratives were used very often even with subject antecedents in the formal register. Since we did not explicitly instruct participants to consider the gender matching subject/object as the antecedent or did not probe which antecedent they considered when they performed the forced-choice task, it is in theory possible that some of the participants considered an antecedent that was not mentioned in the sentence. Given the design of the experiments we cannot rule out this possibility, however, we think that this effect could also be because of the constraint of language formality being very strong for dieser-demonstratives which licenses (or even promotes) its use in some of the cases despite the antecedent being the subject. If we compare the responses for comparison B with subject antecedents in formal register, we again see that dieser-demonstrative is preferred 19% of the time despite there being a legitimate option of personal pronoun available, which is used only about 63% of the time. Yet another factor that could have an influence on having this pattern is that die-demonstratives are dispreferred in written modality (along with dispreferring the subject antecedent) and that forced participants to choose diese-demonstrative (instead of always opting for the ‘neither’ option). However, without further experiments, it will not be possible to straightforwardly claim which factor or factors led to this pattern.

On a side note, we want to point out that although it may seem that the gender of the pronoun had an effect, as we mentioned earlier, we kept gender as one of the predictors so that the statistical model captures the variance in the data, if there is any, due to two different genders of the pronouns. It is interesting that the effect is strong in comparisons A and B, but strangely it is in the opposite direction; moreover, the effect is not strong for comparison C. Given this pattern of effects and the fact that we did not have any prediction about this effect in either direction, it does not seem informative to speculate what might be the reason behind it.

Another effect we observed that was not part of the set of hypotheses we wanted to test was the one with the ‘neither’ option — ‘neither’ was chosen more often than we expected, for example, in comparison C in the informal register, and with subject antecedent in the formal register. See Table A1 in the Appendix for model estimates of the statistical analysis for ‘neither’ across three comparisons. The result show effects of antecedent type and register type — ‘neither’ was used more often with subject antecedent than with object antecedent, and in the informal register than in the formal register. As mentioned earlier, the ‘neither’ option was mainly included as a way for participants to convey disapproval of either of the pronouns; since we expected that both demonstratives will be perceived unsuitable with subject antecedents the option of rejecting both was necessary, especially in the comparison where both pronoun alternatives were demonstrative pronouns, i.e. comparison C. Interestingly, in comparison C, ‘neither’ was chosen more frequently either in informal register or in formal register with subject antecedent, but not when the antecedent was the object in formal register. This pattern can be easily explained based on our earlier discussion. In the cases when ‘neither’ was frequent the other two alternatives were anyway considered illicit because die-demonstratives are dispreferred in general and diese-demonstratives are dispreferred in informal register and with subject antecedent (see earlier discussion for details). In the case when ‘neither’ was not used frequently one of the alternatives was the preferred one, i.e. the diese-demonstrative in formal register with object antecedent. This pattern, in fact, justifies inclusion of the ‘neither’ option along with two pronouns. There were other two cases when ‘neither’ was chosen around 20% of the time, both were the cases with formal register with subject antecedents across comparisons A and B. Although these percentages are not as high as those for ‘neither’ in comparison C and are much lower than the preferred option — the personal pronoun which was chosen around 60% and 80% of the time in these cases — they are nevertheless unexpected since personal pronoun is a completely suitable option in these cases. We do not have any explanation for this pattern, but this pattern also does not affect our main generalisations about diese-demonstratives.

One factor that we did not explicitly control for in our experiments was the dialectal variation of the participants. We recruited our participants through Osnabrück University›s student mailing list and Facebook posts. As a result the participants were not uniformly distributed across all German speaking regions (c.f. Figure A3 in the Appendix for the distribution of participants) and majority of them came from the north-western and northern parts of Germany (Osnabrück University is in the north-western part of Germany); hence, in theory, it is possible that our results are limited to the dialects spoken in these regions.

Although Expt. 1a and 1b supported the claim that diese-demonstratives require formal language to justify their use, and they demonstrate subject-avoidance like the die-demonstratives, it is still possible that the constraint suggested in Zifonun et al. (1997) — diese-demonstratives prefer the last mentioned entity as the antecedent — is also in operation. All the sentences used in the current design are such that the object in the sentence is the last mentioned entity, and, hence, the object antecedent preference that we see in the formal register is, in fact, a preference towards the last mentioned entity. In the next experiment we tease apart these two possible explanations.

3.2 Results

The responses are plotted in Figure 2, and results of data analysis are listed in Table 3. We found that for both canonical and non-canonical word order, participants preferred object antecedents more often than the subject antecedents. There was also an effect of the word order implying that the preference for object antecedent was weaker in non-canonical condition than in canonical condition.

Figure 2

The plot represents responses to the comprehension question. Each bar shows the percentage of choosing subject (light grey) or object antecedent (dark grey) in canonical or non-canonical condition (the confidence intervals are calculated using prop.test() function in R).

3.3 Discussion

The goal of Expt. 2 was to test if diese-demonstratives prefer the last mentioned entity as the antecedent as proposed by Zifonun et al. (1997) or if this preference is simply due to the fact that last mentioned referents are usually the objects of the sentence. It is clear from the results that the object antecedent is preferred unequivocally over the subject antecedent independently of their order of mention suggesting that grammatical roles of the referents influence antecedent preferences for diese-demonstratives and not the linear order in which they are mentioned in the sentences.

Although there was a strong preference for object antecedent over subject antecedent, it interacted with the word order such that in non-canonical word order the object antecedent was preferred less often than in canonical word order (68% vs. 81%). One possible explanation for this interaction could be that diese-demonstratives behave the same way as die-demonstratives when the subject of the sentence is not in the clause initial position. The weakening of non-subject bias for die-demonstratives in non-canonical structures has been reported in a similar forced-choice antecedent selection task (Schumacher et al. 2016) and also in a sentence completion study (Bosch et al. 2007).

Another explanation could be that there is in fact an effect of the proximity of the referents in the sentence (Zifonun et al. 1997): since the subject is closer to the demonstrative in the non-canonical structure, it becomes more available as the antecedent of the diese-demonstrative and we see interaction between subject-avoidance and order of mention. How exactly subject-avoidance and word order interact for diese-demonstratives is indeed an interesting question but, as far as the goals of this paper are concerned, it is sufficient to find out that the effect of subject-avoidance comes out to be much stronger than that of the order of mention. Overall, Expt. 2 supports our conclusion in Expt. 1 that diese-demonstratives prefer grammatical objects over subjects as their antecedent, a subject-avoidance strategy as it has been reported in the past for die-demonstratives.