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Demonstratives posses some qualities which set them apart from other function words with which they are usually grouped. Diesel (2006: 464) claims that “demonstratives constitute a unique class of linguistic expressions serving one of the most fundamental functions in language: In their basic use, they serve to coordinate the interlocutors’ joint focus of attention”. Demonstratives have a special status among words – they are present in every language, they are among the oldest words and they are among the first words that children learn. However, the fact that demonstratives are present in all languages does not mean that the system of demonstratives is organized identically in all languages. Languages tend to ‘view’ the world around us differently and require us to pay attention to different aspects of reality (cf. Slobin’s Thinking-for- speaking hypothesis), which in turn means that the systems of demonstratives present in various languages differ in several many aspects, including the number of the members that a particular system of demonstratives has. When two languages the demonstrative systems of which differ in the number of their members meet, some difficulties are bound to arise. One such pair of languages includes Croatian which has a three-way paradigm consisting of a proximal (ovaj), medial (taj) and distal (onaj) elements, and English which has a two-way paradigm consisting of a proximal (this) and distal (that) element. Teaching practice with Croatian students of English has shown that Croatian students frequently have problems with English demonstratives. Sometimes students make mistakes even in the case of the proximal and distal demonstratives, but it is the medial one which presents a true challenge. This should come as no surprise, since the medial element has no counterpart in English. Instead, depending on the context it is either translated as ‘this’ or as ‘that’. In addition to this, there is another aspect to this story that further confounds it – the fact that the medial element is gradually pushing out both the proximal and the distal elements and is increasingly being used in both the proximal and distal senses (Brala-Vukanović & Matešić, 2015). The goal of this paper is to try to determine, on the basis of student translations from Croatian into English and from English into Croatian, which factors might contribute to the error rate when it comes to the medial element – e.g. is the error rate greater when the medial element appears on its own, or when it is accompanied by a noun? ; is the error rate greater when the medial element is used to refer to a visible entity or an invisible one? ; does the way in which the medial element is used (recognitional use, unstressed this, discourse deictic demonstratives) affect the error-rate? ; etc. |
