The use of demonstratives and context activation in Catalan parliamentary debate

Abstract

Context is crucial in analyzing parliamentary debate, a field which has recently attracted attention from various perspectives. However, not many contributions focus on specific linguistic markers that shape and are simultaneously influenced by the context of production. The present article aims to partially fill in this gap by analyzing the demonstratives used in parliamentary debates and highlighting how they contribute to activating different aspects of context. After summarizing the features of parliamentary debate as a genre and the importance and complexity of context considered as a subjective and dynamic mental construct, the pragmatic functions of demonstratives are presented and the most frequent uses occurring in two debates in the Catalan Parliament are illustrated, namely text deictic and discourse-context demonstratives. The analysis shows the discourse significance of the latter, which corresponds to noun phrases such as this Parliament, referring to the members of parliament as a body, or this statement, referring to the document under discussion. These uses of a proximal demonstrative pointing to the shared context of communication clearly differ from text deictics. They are similar to but also different from both situational demonstratives, which point to the perceived context, and recognitional demonstratives, which point to the shared knowledge between the participants, the penultimate. The overall analysis not only enriches the description of parliamentary debates, but it also contributes to a more complete description of the various uses of demonstratives and to a better understanding of the complexity and dynamicity of context in this genre.