Endophoric demonstratives such as this and that are among the most frequently used words in written texts. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how exactly they should be subdivided and classified in terms of their different types of use. Here, we develop a new taxonomy of endophoric demonstratives based on a large-scale corpus including three written genres: news items, encyclopedic texts, and book reviews. The taxonomy enables analysts to reliably code endophoric demonstratives based on objectively applicable criteria, while at the same time making them aware of many subtle borderline cases. We consider the taxonomy as a theoretical foundation for future theoretical and empirical work into endophoric demonstratives, and as an analytical tool allowing researchers to unify and compare the results of studies on endophoric demonstratives coming from different genres and languages.

Research into human communication has been grouped under two traditions: referential and sociolinguistic. The study of a communication behavior simultaneously from both paradigms appears to be absent. Basically, this paper analyzes the use of private and social speech, through both a referential task (Word Pairs) and a naturalistic dyadic setting (Lego-set) administered to a sample of 64 children from grades 3 and 5. All children, of 8 and 10 years of age, used speech that was not adapted to the decoder, and thus ineffective for interpersonal communication, in both referential and sociolinguistic communication. Pairs of high-skill referential encoders used significantly more task-relevant social speech, that is, cognitively more complex, than did low-skill dyads in the naturalistic context. High-skill referential encoder dyads showed a trend to produce more inaudible private speech than did low-skill ones during spontaneous communication. Gender did not affect the results.

Objects can almost always be called by more than one name, and the name chosen depends on the context. However, studies of naming in some traditions elicit names by showing objects in isolation and asking merely What is it? If the names produced are not the same as those that would be given in more fully specified communicative contexts, the value of the tasks for understanding object naming is in doubt. The current study examined the effects of different communicative demands on naming of 60 household containers. A standard “free naming” task was contrasted with two other versions. In these two, participants had the goal of getting an addressee to find a target object among others. In one, each object needed to be distinguished from a small set of dissimilar objects, visible to the addressee. In the other, each needed to be distinguished from a large set of similar objects, not visible to the addressee. Responses were sensitive to context in the number of modifiers produced. However, they were insensitive in the head nouns produced. Simple naming tasks such as What is it? can produce results for head nouns equivalent to those from tasks providing more fully specified communicative contexts.