I couldn't find any literature with comparative analysis of the use of 'it', 'this' and 'that'. Would you recommend any book or article?
I wish I could. I did have a look but to no avail. I'm not actually surprised, though, because I don't think there is anything. If I come across anything interesting, I'll let you know.
Would you please summarize your take on the pronoun choice reasons, especially with respect to immediate short responses like 'X is true/makes sense/I know X'? And then, let's call it a day.
- it is a 'grammar' word. It has a grammatical/logical function. Its reference is to another grammatical/logical element within the discourse. Because of this, you can invoke linguistic rules to talk about how it's used.
- this/that are very different. They are are not 'grammar' words. Their use, being deictic, depends on extralinguistic factors. These factors are ultimately psychological. Any productive investigation must therefore take a psychological approach.
The complicating factors here, as I see them:
1) Similar to
this/that, the reference word
it can sometimes have as a referent a
thought, rather than a grammatical/logical element. See
this thread, where the OP has in my view gotten bogged down in working out a grammatical explanation where only a psychological one exists, leading him to conclude that the use of
it is an error. Inasmuch as there are grammatical/logical rules governing anaphoric reference, he has a point, but he fails to understand the use in terms of a psychological explanation—what the speaker means, rather than what the language itself means.
2) The use of demonstratives to point to utterances as objects (so-called discourse deixis). This is especially complicated by assigning truth-values (as in our examples
it/this is true), because objects cannot logically be true/false. The interpretation of an utterance such as
That's true must therefore be simultaneously both a reference to an utterance as an object and to the propositional content of an utterance, similar to with
it.
I'm ready to stop the discussion there, but before we do, I'd like to thank you for making me think in depth about something I find very interesting.