Hi All
I have always struggled a little bit with demonstratives, in the “straight forward” use-cases where it refers to a person or object makes sense … this/ that is an “object” etc… but when it gets into phrases like “this is impossible because blah”, I seem to get a complete mixture of variable and invariable demonstratives even on the same phrase…maybe there is context or more indicators in the sentence to infer what should be used, but its not jumping off the page to me.
I actually used a portuguese corpus also to see frequency of phrases and what demonstratives were being used for the same or similar phrases and it showed common phrases using mixtures of variable and invariable demonstratives as very common in frequency counts.
Can anyone help and shed any light on the subject please !?
Damien.