Psychologically distal demonstratives in Scandinavian are not "discourse new"

Scandinavian languages have a demonstrative (in the form of the third person
pronoun) used with nouns or noun phrases, which is different from more well-known
spatial demonstratives. Johannessen (2008) argued that its conditions of use are
related to psychological distance, while Lie (2010) argued that its main role is to
invoke a referent in discourse. In this chapter, I have gone through empirical data,
two short stories and four speech corpus dialogues, and investigated the use of this
demonstrative (called the psychologically distal demonstrative or PDD). It is
concluded that there are many occurrences of the PDD that would remain unexplained
in Lie’s account: It can occur more than once per discourse, it can be used by both
interlocutors in the same discourse, and not all referents are denoted by it. Also, it
does not point out only key referents. An account based on psychological distance
can explain the empirical facts.