Bare Nouns Competing with Pronouns
2
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
With recent developments in typological studies of definiteness, a question of whether and how an articleless language encodes different types of definiteness with bare nouns has received much attention. This paper focuses on an observation that while these bare argument languages allow a uniqueness-denoting definite interpretation, not all of them allow the anaphoric interpretation. I argue that the distribution of anaphoric bare nouns is constrained by a pragmatic competition induced by morphosyntactically simplex pronouns available in the language. In order to account for this competition, I argue for a parallel semantics between pronouns and definite descriptions, where the only difference between the two types of expressions is the kind and the amount of descriptive content they carry.
Abstract
With recent developments in typological studies of definiteness, a question of whether and how an articleless language encodes different types of definiteness with bare nouns has received much attention. This paper focuses on an observation that while these bare argument languages allow a uniqueness-denoting definite interpretation, not all of them allow the anaphoric interpretation. I argue that the distribution of anaphoric bare nouns is constrained by a pragmatic competition induced by morphosyntactically simplex pronouns available in the language. In order to account for this competition, I argue for a parallel semantics between pronouns and definite descriptions, where the only difference between the two types of expressions is the kind and the amount of descriptive content they carry.