Psychologically distal demonstratives

Psychologically distal demonstratives (PDDs) are a phenomenon that has not been noticed in traditional dialectology in the Nordic countries. One reason for this is possibly that they have been confused with the preproprial articles (PPAs, see Johannessen & Garbacz 2014), with which they share some properties. However, recently a number of publications concerning the PDDs have appeared: Johannessen (2006, 2008a, 2008b) and Strahan (2008). The PDD always has the shape of a pronoun, and is preposed to either a name or some other noun phrase denoting a human. The PDD has a special semantics that will be described in section 3. Suffice it to be said here that the psychologically distal demonstrative is used to indicate a psychological, not physical, distance between the person referred to and some other person in the discourse, normally the speaker, but occasionally also the listener. The distance is either relatively neutral, simply implying that the person referred to is unknown to the speaker (or other participant), or even somewhat negative, implying that the speaker is not necessarily very fond of this person. The PDD can be found in Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish. Faroese has not been investigated yet. The examples below are from Johannessen (2008a:162).


Introduction
Psychologically distal demonstratives (PDDs) are a phenomenon that has not been noticed in traditional dialectology in the Nordic countries.One reason for this is possibly that they have been confused with the preproprial articles (PPAs, see Johannessen & Garbacz 2014), with which they share some properties.However, recently a number of publications concerning the PDDs have appeared: Johannessen (2006Johannessen ( , 2008aJohannessen ( , 2008b) ) and Strahan (2008).The PDD always has the shape of a pronoun, and is preposed to either a name or some other noun phrase denoting a human.The PDD has a special semantics that will be described in section 3. Suffice it to be said here that the psychologically distal demonstrative is used to indicate a psychological, not physical, distance between the person referred to and some other person in the discourse, normally the speaker, but occasionally also the listener.The distance is either relatively neutral, simply implying that the person referred to is unknown to the speaker (or other participant), or even somewhat negative, implying that the speaker is not necessarily very fond of this person.The PDD can be found in Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish.
Faroese has not been investigated yet.The examples below are from Johannessen (2008a:162). (

Nordic Syntax Database (NSD)
There are two sentences in the database based on the ScanDiaSyn survey that are designed to check whether the PDD exists in the Nordic dialects.One of them tests a pronoun (the would-be PDD) with a common noun (2) and the other a pronoun with a proper name (3).In both cases, the informants were presented with a piece of context to trigger the psychologically distal interpretation.Sentence (2) is the real test sentence for the PDD, since sentence (3), even when presented to the informants with a degree of stress (one of the characteristics of the PDD), could be confused with a sentence containing a preproprial article.Since (2) contains only a common noun, such confusion cannot be found here.We present the map for (2) below.The PDD was only tested in Norway and Sweden.The map is dominated by white and grey markers, although there are a few black ones in South Norway, and in Northern Sweden.We will get back to this in section 2.2 and 3.

Nordic Dialect Corpus (NDC)
There are two reasons we would like to investigate the Nordic Dialect Corpus in addition to the syntax database.
One is that the PDD was only investigated in Norway and Sweden for the syntax database.The other is that there are some black markers on Map 1.It would be good if the spontaneous speech data in the NDC could shed some light on the results from the NSD.Let us first look for PDDs in Danish, Faroese, and Icelandic.As accounted for in Johannessen (2008a), the PDD in the mainland Nordic languages is not inflected for case, i.e., not in Norwegian, Swedish and Danish.This means that the PDD always has the same case realisation independently of the syntactic position of the determiner phrase containing the PDD.In Norwegian and Swedish, the PDD There are examples of the PDD in all the three languages, Danish, Faroese and Icelandic, that were not tested for the PDD in the syntax database.To be fair, the Faroese example could be either the PDD or the PPA as it stands, but given that the PPA does not exist in Faroese (there is no mention of it in Thráinsson et al. 2004), we take this (only) example from the corpus to be an instance of the PDD.