Disjunctive discourse referents in French Sign Language

Disjoined noun phrases, like indefinites, may introduce indeterminate discourse referents. Disjunction provides more flexibility in some respects than indefinites, though, as the two disjuncts may bear different morphological features, and a disjunctive discourse referent may have a split antecedent. Sign language, too, has been shown to bear on arguments pertaining to discourse anaphora. Notably, discourse referents may be established at locations in the signing space (loci), closely paralleling the use of variables in dynamic semantics. Here, we compare several theories of disjunctive anaphora and of space in sign language with new data from French Sign Language (LSF). We argue that loci must be mediated by a featural layer that iconically preserves mereological properties.

Peculiarities of Deixis and Anaphora in Speech Discourse

This article considers peculiarities of deixis and anaphora in speech discourse. The author of the article believes that the separation of deictic and anaphora relations as independent objects of research in linguistics is associated with the consideration of the problems of deixis as a category of general activity theory, communicative-functional, pragmatic and cognitive linguistics, and anaphora as a category of text/discourse linguistics, which provides its structural-syntactic and semantic coherence. This explains the transition from the study of the characteristics of syntactic anaphora, mainly pronouns, within the sentence/utterance to the consideration of text / discourse anaphora.

Remarks on propositional nominalization

Moulton’s ‘Remarks on propositional nominalization’ investigates nominalization at the highest reaches of the extended verbal projection, finite CPs. While CPs can express propositions, Moulton puts forward the novel claim that only nominalization of CPs by a semantically-contentful N can deliver reference to propositional objects. This conclusion is in contrast to the propositional nominalization operations proposed in Chierchia (1984), Potts (2002), and Takahashi (2010). Evidence comes from a correlation between two types of D+CP constructions in Spanish (Picallo, 2002; Serrano, 2014, 2015) and the kind of propositions they can describe. Moulton then shows that a similar pattern arises in the case of exophoric propositional proforms, a novel observation. Putting the two case studies together, the following picture emerges: Natural language does not permit reference to proposition-like objects directly by adding a D to a CP, but only via some content-bearing entity (e.g. Moltmann’s (2013) attitudinal objects). In the case of propositional nominalizations, this entity must come in the form a lexical N; in the case of propositional discourse anaphora, this must come in the form of a discourse referent that bears propositional content, such as an assertion event (Hacquard, 2006). <189>

Armeno-Iranian Structural Interaction: The Case of Parthian wxd, Armenian ink‘n

While Armenian is not a member of the Iranian language family, its lexicon is replete with borrowings from esp. Parthian. This paper ventures to show that borrowing is not restricted to lexical items alone, but extends to the realm of syntax as well. This will be demonstrated by means of a corpus based investigation of the usage of Middle Persian xwd, Parthian wxd and its functional counterpart, Armenian ink‘n; furthermore, parallels regarding the expression of reflexivity in both language groups are addressed. The tripartite function of the respective pronouns as intensifier, discourse anaphora and clause level anaphora are the result of extended language contact between Armenian and Western Middle Iranian.