Learners of English do not necessarily have a good command of the demonstratives. There are a variety of unexpected uses and these can be classified according to several criteria. Semantically, learners may experience difficulties when constructing referential processes. Research on deictic and anaphoric processes provides better understanding of their output. At functional level, learners experience difficulties in the selection between one form or the other. Still at functional level, there are two learner-specific micro-systems of use in which the form interact. Firstly, in the proform function, they interact with the pronoun it. Secondly, in their determiner function they interact with the determiner the. It appears that for learners this and that have competitor forms and a close investigation of their use in learner corpora would provide answers on the extent with which such issues arise.
More on this in (Gaillat, 2013a). Draft version here.