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Demonstrative and Discourse Deixis in French : a comparative analysis based on medieval texts and modern French transcriptions of oral speechThis paper deals with one of the major pragmatic uses of the demonstrative in French, the discourse deictic use (Himmelmann 1996). We argue that in this use, the demonstrative, which refers to the interpretation of one or more clauses, is deictic and anaphoric at the same time. It constrains the addressee to identify the discourse segment it is pointing to in order to understand which object is being referred to. We use a corpus of medieval French texts and of modern French transcriptions of oral speech to find some criteria which can help identify the context and the referent of the deictic demonstrative in discourse.