Contrast and the pronominal use of the demonstratives 'der' and 'dieser' in German

In this paper, I report the results of a forced choice experiment in which I empirically investigated whether the linguistic factor contrast between several discourse referents affects people’s choice to use the German pronominal demonstrative der or dieser to anaphorically pick up the contrasted referent. The main hypothesis was according to Bisle-Müller (1991) and Ahrenholz (2007) that dieser is able to express contrast and therefore should be preferred in the contrastive cases. However, the results do not support the hypothesis. Instead, they are in line with Bosch & Hinterwimmer (2016), who claim that der can express a contrast as well.