Nouns and Noun Phrases - University of Macau Library

Determiners: articles and pronouns 849
week the flood occurred, which can be stressed by the more specialized form
diezelfde ‘the very same’.
(474) a. De koningin gaat/ *? ging deze week nog naar Zeeland.
the Queen goes/went this week PRT to Zeeland
b. De koningin ging/ # gaat die(zelfde) week nog naar Zeeland.
the Queen goes/went the.very.same week PRT to Zeeland
Furthermore, the notion of distance may be taken more metaphorically as
“relatedness” to the speaker. There seems to be a tendency for the speaker to use the
distal demonstrative to refer to an object belonging to the addressee and the
proximate demonstrative when he is the owner himself. So, with two people at a
table with a book on it, the speaker will prefer the use of the distal demonstrative
when he is asking permission to browse someone else’s book, and the proximate
demonstrative when he is granting that person permission to browse his book.
(475) a. Mag ik dat boek even in kijken?
may I that book for.a.moment into look
‘Can I browse that book?’
b. Wil je dit boek even bekijken?
want you this book for.a.moment look.at
‘Do you want to browse this book?’
However, other considerations can readily overrule this tendency. For example,
when the speaker is already holding the book, it is more likely that he will use the
proximate pronoun to ask permission, and when the addressee is already holding the
book, he will probably use the distal one to grant permission to browse the book.
On its deictic use, the demonstratives are typically used to partition the
denotation set of the modified head noun. This is particularly clear in contrastive
contexts like (476), where the speaker explicitly refers to two subsets of books, but
the same thing holds for non-contrastive contexts (although in those cases the
evoked alternative referent set may be empty, as in the context sketched for the
examples in (475)).
(476) a. Je moet niet DIT maar DAT boek lezen.
you must not this but that book read
b. Je moet niet DEZE maar DIE boeken lezen.
you must not these but those books read
II. Interrogative demonstratives
Seen semantically, the pronoun welk(e) can be considered the interrogative
counterpart of the D-linked demonstrative pronouns in Table 12. The non-D-linked
demonstratives zo’n ‘such a’ and zulk(e) ‘such’ also seem to have an interrogative
counterpart: wat voor (een) ‘what kind of’.