Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

5.2 Demonstratives
The function of demonstratives is not only to mark something as known, but 
also to position it as proximal or distal from the point of view of the discourse 
participants. As previous research has shown (Biber et al. 1999, Gray and 
Cortes 2011), demonstratives, and especially the proximal 
this/these
, both as 
determiners and pronouns, are highly frequent in academic discourse due to their 
potential to mark “immediate textual reference” (Biber et al. 1999: 349), i.e. they 
have a discourse deictic function. The frequency of demonstratives in my corpus 
confirms that these 
indexicals are very frequent in 
research articles in the field of 
applied linguistics (cf. Gray and Cortes 2011). The data summarized in Table 1-4 
also show that while 
this
and 
these
tend to be used more frequently as determiners 
than as pronouns, 
that
and 
those
tend to have a pronominal function.