Yu, Hyewon. 2018. Factors Influencing the Use of English Demonstratives. Language
Information 27, 89-114. The purpose of this study is to investigate which factors
influence the choice of English demonstratives and to examine Koreans’ use of English
demonstratives. Two experiments were conducted in the research – one was to examine
which factors decide the degree of focus, the concept used in the theory suggested
by Strauss (1992) as one of the criteria of demonstrative choices, and the other was
to explore whether Korean students know that the focus of entities as well as distance
affects the use of English demonstratives. For both experiments, task-type questionnaires
were used and the results were analyzed using chi-square statistics. In Experiment
1, native English speakers and Korean adults who are advanced learners of English
participated. The study indicated that both of the groups were influenced most by
ownership among the three factors, ownership, meaningfulness, and price. Experiment
2 was carried out subsequently to investigate if the concept of ownership in fact influence
Korean high school students’ use of English demonstratives. The results indicated that
ownership, the factor which was used as a substitute of focus in this experiment, did
not affect high school students’ choices much. These results suggest that they might
not be yet aware of the fact that not only distance but also other aspects such as
ownership can have an impact on the choice of English demonstratives.

Keywords: English demonstratives, proximity theory, focus theory, importance,
ownership, demonstrative choices, this/that