German has two demonstrative pronouns: the der, die, das paradigm and the dieser, diese, dies(es) paradigm. Previous studies mainly compared the anaphoric use of der with the personal pronoun er and observed that der refers to less prominent antecedents. However, there are only very few studies that have investigated the differences between these two demonstrative pronouns. We hypothesize that they differ in signaling topic persistence and in accessing contrastive antecedents. We tested these hypotheses in short texts that manipulated the contrast of the antecedent by inducing the expression ‘in contrast to’ vs. ‘together with’ (e.g., the cellist in contrast to the flautist vs. the cellist together with the flautist). Results from our eye-tracking reading Experiment (Experiment 1), in which participants’ eye- movements were monitored while reading sentences, show that (i) readers preferred dieser when referring to the topic of a sentence, and (ii) dieser caused less processing difficulties than der in both contrast and no-contrast contexts. Our sentence completion Experiment (Experiment 2) also confirmed that der and dieser are both used for anaphoric reference to a topical antecedent. Collectively, our experiments provide evidence that dieser functions as inducing topic persistence. These results suggest that there is a need for further experimental investigation into the semantic factors and informational structures influencing the usage of demonstrative pronouns in German.
