Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Spatial demonstratives (words like this and that) are thought toprimarily be used for carving up space into a peripersonal andextrapersonal domain. However, when given a noun out ofcontext and asked to couple it with a demonstrative, speakerstend to use this for manipulable objects (small, harmless,inanimate), while non-manipulable objects (large, harmful,animate) are more likely to be coupled with that. Here, weextend these findings and map demonstrative use along a widespectrum of semantic features. We conducted a large-scale (N= 2197) experiment eliciting demonstratives for 506 words,rated across 65+11 perceptually and cognitively relevantsemantic dimensions. We replicated the findings thatdemonstrative choice is influenced by object manipulability.Demonstrative choice was additionally found to be related to aset of semantic factors, including valence, arousal, loudness,motion, time and more generally, the self. Importantly,demonstrative choices were highly structured acrossparticipants, as shown by a strong correlation detected in asplit-sample comparison of by-word demonstrativedistribution.