Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

German has two demonstrative series, the der (die, das) series and the dieser (diese, dieses) series. Both have been claimed to be topic shifters, taking up a non-topical antecedent and promoting it to topichood. However, der can form topical referential chains, while dieser cannot. We operationalize discourse topichood via questions and provide evidence from a corpus study and an acceptability study that while dieser is indeed sensitive to topichood and avoids topical antecedents, der is compatible with topical antecedents. We hypothesize that only dieser is a discourse topic shifter, while der marks a sentence topic.