14. Demonstrative and anaphoric pronouns

Keyword(s):  
Language ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 78
Author(s):  
Gilbert Harman
Keyword(s):  

Virittäjä ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 162
Author(s):  
Auli Hakulinen ◽  
Lea Laitinen

Anaphoric zero: Grammar and affect [myös suomeksi] (englanti)2/2008 (112)Anaphoric zero: Grammar and affectThe article examines the syntactic and semantic properties of the anaphoric zero in spoken and written Finnish. Referentially, the zero is equivalent to the third person pronoun hn he/she or he they. However, the writers started out with the hypothesis that this does not necessarily hold for other possible kinds of meaning conveyed by the two different devices, the anaphoric zero and anaphoric pronouns. In standardised written language the conditions for use of the zero are fairly clear cut: within a sentence it is mainly used as an anaphoric device, but in a subordinate clause that precedes the main clause it is also used as a forward-looking, anticipatory anaphor. In spoken language as well as in literary prose the syntactic conditions are more flexible. During the course of the research, it was the literary texts that proved especially fruitful for understanding the implications involved in the use of the anaphoric zero.In earlier work (e.g. Kalliokoski 1990; Heinonen 1995), it has been pointed out that the anaphoric zero typically ties two successive clauses together more tightly than a pronoun would. The writers are able to show that it does something else as well. In talk-in-interaction, it conveys the speakers commitment to and often affiliation with the previous speakers perspective and stance. In reported speech - both in spoken language and in literary dialogue - the zero can convey the speakers attitude concerning the thoughts of the person being referred to, for example irony and empathy.The writers argue that when the zero represents one alternative in a paradigm it is empty only in (morpho)syntactical terms, not in terms of meaning. Whether the speaker chooses a pronoun (hn or he) or a zero, he/she makes a rhetorical choice. The zero alternative creates implications, expressing the speakers affective stance and attitude in relation to the characters in the story, or his/her interpretation of the speech, thought or behaviour of the co-participant or the story character that he/she is quoting.It is striking that in more than 90 per cent of the 150 examples used, the verb is at the beginning of the utterance or turn. In the rest of the cases, the verb is often preceded by an epistemic adverb (varmaan definitely, tuskin hardly), or the utterance is formed as a fixed construction. The writers hypothesise that the grammar of the anaphoric zero should include verb initial position as one of its constitutive factors. This factor is typical both for co-ordinated and subordinated sentences of the standard written language that are governed by syntactic rules, and for the turn-initial expressions that arise from the speakers or narrators affective stance towards the matter at hand.Auli Hakulinen Lea Laitinen- - - - - - - - - - - -Anaforinen nolla: Kielioppia ja affektejaArtikkeli käsittelee anaforisen nollan syntaktisia ja semanttisia ominaisuuksia puhutussa ja kirjoitetussa suomessa. Referentiaalisesti nolla vastaa kolmannen persoonan pronomineja hän, he. Lähdimme kuitenkin siitä oletuksesta, että vastaavuus ei välttämättä koske niiden muita funktioita. Normitetussa kirjakielessä nollan käytön ehdot ovat jokseenkin selvät: virkkeen rajoissa se on anaforinen mutta päälausetta edeltävässä sivulauseessa myös eteenpäin katsova, ennakoiva anafora. Puhutussa kielessä samoin kuin kaunokirjallisessa proosassa anaforisen nollan syntaktiset ehdot ovat joustavammat. Varsinkin kaunokirjalliset tekstit osoittautuivat hedelmällisiksi yrittäessmme tutkimuksen kuluessa ymmrätää nollan käyttöön liittyviä implikaatioita. Aikaisemmassa tutkimuksessa (Kalliokoski 1990, Heinonen 1995) on todettu, että anaforinen nolla sitoo kaksi perättäistä lausetta tiukemmin yhteen kuin pronomini. Omassa tutkimuksessamme voimme osoittaa sen tekevän muutakin. Keskustelupuheessa se välittää puhujan sitoutumista ja usein asettumista (affiliaatiota) edellisen puhujan perspektiiviin ja asennoitumiseen. Referoinnissa - niin vapaassa puheessa kuin kaunokirjallisessa dialogissakin - nolla voi tuoda esiin puhujan asennoitumisen puheenalaisen henkilön ajatuksiin, esimerkiksi ironisia tai empaattisia affekteja.Väitämme siis, että kun nolla on yksi paradigman vaihtoehdoista, se on tyhjä vain (morfo)syntaktisesti, ei merkitykseltään. Käyttää puhuja sitten pronominia hän, he tai nollaa, hän tekee retorisen valinnan. Nollavaihtoehto luo implikaatioita, ilmaisee puhujan affektia ja suhtautumista kertomuksen henkilöön tai tulkintaa referoimansa puhekumppanin tai kertomuksen henkilön puheesta, ajattelusta tai käyttäytymisestä.Huomiota herttää, että yli 90 %:ssa 150 esimerkistämme verbi on lausuman- tai vuoronalkuinen. Lopuissa tapauksista verbi edeltää usein episteeminen adverbi (varmaan, tuskin) tai lausumana on kiteytynyt konstruktio. Hypoteesimme on, että verbialkuisuus on anaforisen nollan kieliopin tärkeä piirre. Se on tyypillinen kirjoitetussa kielessä sekä rinnasteisille ja alisteisille virkkeille, joita säätelevät kirjakielen normit, että vuoronalkuisille ilmauksille, jotka ilmentävät puhujan tai kertojan affektista suhtautumista käsillä olevaan. Auli Hakulinen Lea Laitinen


1972 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. Warburton ◽  
N. S. Prabhu
Keyword(s):  

Vivarium ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 511-521
Author(s):  
Terry Parsons

Abstract This paper is about the development of logic in the Aristotelian tradition, from Aristotle to the mid-fourteenth century. I will compare four systems of logic with regard to their expressive power. 1. Aristotle’s own logic, based mostly on chapters 1-2 and 4-7 of his Prior Analytics 2. An expanded version of Aristotle’s logic that one finds, e.g., in Sherwood’s Introduction to Logic and Peter of Spain’s Tractatus 3-5. Versions of the logic of later supposition theorists such as William Ockham, John Buridan, and Paul of Venice. Version 4 is the logic without relatives (anaphoric pronouns); version 5 adds relatives. I am ignoring modals, conditionals that are not ut nunc, infinitizing negation, exclusives and exceptives, all exponibles, all insolubles, and terms with simple or material supposition, ampliation and restriction, and many other things.


1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 173-189
Author(s):  
Agnès Tutin

Anaphors constitute a well-known problem in automatic text generation and natural language understanding. Using corpora to deal with such phenomena could help to develop robust processing techniques. Building such resources is, though, a tedious and time-consuming task and could more easily be accomplished by partial automation. In this paper, we show how the intex system can be used for this task. We show that in a newspaper corpus (in this case, le Monde Diplomatique), discursive grammatical anaphors can easily be located via associated linguistic features. A series of transducers generating tags for categories and functions can thus be built, and constitutes an efficient pre-processing stage (though manual checking remains necessary). The heuristics, quickly and easily developed, are specific to the task. The study goes on to show, however, that discarding non-anaphoric pronouns is not straightforward in the case of non-referential personal pronouns or indefinite pronouns, and that the tagging of the grammatical function seems limited in the absence of real syntactic processing.


2005 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 439-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
VICTOR EMMANUEL MILLOGO

This paper describes the acquisition of the 3rd person pronoun ‘il/elle’ (he, she, it) in seven to twelve-year-old French children (N=58), in written production. An experiment was conducted to examine the relationship between the use of this anaphoric pronoun and the accessibility of the memory-trace of the corresponding referent in the texts. Referential accessibility in short texts was varied according to three factors: referential distance, thematization of the agent role (first sentence subject), and discourse focus. We found that the children were sensitive to the distance factor as early as 7;0, i.e. they used fewer personal pronouns when the referential distance increased. However, children of different ages differed in their weighting of the discourse focus factor and the thematization factor: the seven-year-olds (N=18) and the eleven-year-olds (N=20) were sensitive to variation of the discourse focus but not the thematization factor, while for the nine-year-olds (N=20) it was the reverse. The main results suggest: (a) when seven and nine-year-olds use the pronoun ‘il/elle’, they do not comply with the constraints associated with the accessibility of the memory-trace of the referent; (b) memory constraints have an effect from the age of 7;0, but only when the discourse focus is maintained. It was concluded that the discourse management of the French personal pronoun ‘il/elle’ is not totally mastered at 11;0: children cannot operationally integrate the whole array of constraints implied in anaphoric management.


2007 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-211
Author(s):  
Jost Gippert ◽  
Wolfgang Schulze

AbstractThe so-called Caucasian Albanian Palimpsest kept in St. Catherine's Monastery on Mt. Sinai for the first time allows to draw a comprehensive picture of one of the languages (probably the state language) of the third medieval Christian kingdom in Transcaucasia, namely (Caucasian) Albania. The relevant parts of the two palimpsest manuscripts (Sin. N 13 and N 55) covering roughly 120 pages (that is two thirds of the two manuscripts) have been deciphered, interpreted, and translated in the course of an international project running since 2003. The Caucasian Albanian texts comprise a) fragments of a Lectionary, and b) parts of the Gospel of John, written by a different hand in a different style. A number of both text-internal and text-external arguments suggest that the original manuscripts were produced in the 7th century A.D. The analysis of the texts clearly argues in favour of the assumption that the translators relied upon corresponding Old Armenian sources. Nevertheless, it can be shown that the texts in parts deviate from those Old Armenian Bible texts that have survived to our days, so that Georgian, Greek, and Syriac sources must also be taken into account. The readable passages of the two texts furnish us with roughly 8,000 word tokens (some 1,000 lemmatised lexical entries). Hence, the Caucasian Albanian palimpsest gives a considerable insight into the lexicon, grammar, and phonology of its language, which can now safely be identified as an early variant of Udi (East Caucasian, Lezgian). Caucasian Albanian (or Old Udi) differs from present-day Udi in a number of features, including an additional set of palatalised consonants, a more conservative system of local case markers, gender distinction within the set of anaphoric pronouns, and a stronger tendency to construe larger clitic chains. The lexicon is marked for three aspects: a) the preservation of Lezgian terms lost in present-day Udi; b) a set of loans from Armenian and (less prominent) from Georgian; c) loan translations especially from Armenian. The syntax of the texts comes close to that of its sources; however, the texts also exhibit a number of syntactic features alien to both Armenian and Georgian. This suggests that the translators tried to find a balance between the preservation of the original wording of the sources and the necessity to meet the needs of the Caucasian Albanian speaking audience.


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