Camil Staps receives Rubicon grant: What does ‘that’ mean?
PhD student Camil Staps is continuing his academic career in Berlin. He receives a Rubicon grant to do research there on demonstrative pronouns.
'I will look at the demonstrative pronoun 'that' in sentences such as: 'That Jan is always late,' Staps explains his upcoming research. 'This kind of sentence is only used when I assume you agree with the content. Involving the hearer in this way may explain why 'that', and not 'this', is used, because the hearer is seen as distant from the speaker.'
For Dutch, this construction has been known for some time, but it is not yet clear whether it works the same in other languages. 'I am going to try to generalise this to other languages and language families,' Staps says. 'The idea is to use Bible translations for this, because then you have a corpus of texts in which every sentence is the same in every language. So you always have the same context, while you can quite easily research a lot of different languages.'
'Nice to have colleagues close by'
In this respect, Staps is looking forward to working with his new Berlin colleagues. 'There is a very good semantics department there, with people from whom I can learn a lot. I also think it would be a nice experience to have colleagues close by. I wrote my dissertation while living in Nijmegen. Only when I spent two months in England for a research stay did I discover how nice it was to talk to other researchers every day and have conversations that go beyond your own research. I hope to continue that in Berlin.'
The Rubicon-programma allows recently promoted scientists to gain experience at a foreign knowledge institution.