Richard Epstein

The distal demonstrative as discourse marker in Beowulf

The literature on the distal demonstrative se in Old English has mainly concentrated on its use as a marker of definiteness (referent identifiability) and deixis. In this article, I focus instead on demonstrative uses that have received much less attention in previous work. Drawing on data from Beowulf , I argue that the distal demonstrative determiner also serves a variety of discourse-pragmatic functions, such as indicating the relative importance of referents; topic continuity; or chapter boundaries.