Referential expressions in monolingual and bilingual children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): A study of informativeness and definiteness

The current study evaluated the separate and combined effects of bilingualism and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on informativeness and definiteness marking of referential expressions. Hebrew-speaking monolingual children (21 with ASD and 28 with typical language development) and Russian–Hebrew-speaking bilingual children (13 with ASD and 30 with typical language development) aged 4–9 years participated. Informativeness, indexed by referential contrasts, was affected by ASD, but not by bilingualism. Definiteness use was non-target-like in children with ASD and in bilingual children, and it was mainly predicted by children’s morpho-syntactic abilities in Hebrew. Language-universal and language-specific properties of referential use are discussed.

Marking definiteness in an articleless language

The main purpose of this paper is to identify the novel type of Korean definiteness marker. Especially I show that Korean KU which originated from the morphological demonstrative ‘that’, instantiates a solid pattern of distribution of definiteness marker. Mainly focusing on the semantico-pragmatic role of KU, the proposal comprises three main parts: (i) Given that Korean employs distinct devices teased apart into uniqueness (i.e. referential use) and familiarity (i.e. anaphoric use) in its definiteness system, I show that the effect of referential use in argument saturating function is achieved by the covert “determiner” in bare nouns, whereas anaphoric use in argument non-saturating function is achieved by the overt KU; (ii) The semantic contribution of KU is analyzed as a domain restrictor (DDR; Etxeberria & Giannakidou 2010) which supplies an indexical property as an argument (Schwarz 2009, 2013; Jenks 2018); (iii) I further show that the DDR operator is present in the syntax, falling out from the standard D position as an adjunctive modifier in a lower DP layer. The contribution of my work is that the proposed account allows us to widen our view of cross-linguistic variation to cases where the prerequisite of definiteness is based on the dissociation of meaning (i.e. the semantic role of D as encoding familiarity) and form (i.e. the syntactic role of D as an argument-building function).

Singular de and its referential use in talk-in-interaction

The Danish pronoun de and its inflections are traditionally described as 3rd person plural, but, as this article demonstrates, it is also used as a gender neutral 3rd person singular pronoun. As this pronoun – termed singular de – has not been documented or described in the literature thus far, the purpose of this article is to provide a grammatical description and analysis of singular de and its referential use in interaction. This is based on 104 occurrences of singular de in naturally occurring conversation. It is found that singular de is used with both generic and specific reference, and that interlocutors may use singular de to avoid indexing gender and orienting to it as a relevant topic in talk-in- interaction (gender-unspecified reference) or to index the referent’s gender as neither male nor female (gender-specified reference). The article also parallels between singular de and English singular they, as well as sociolinguistic variation in the use of singular de which could be topics for future studies.

Semantic contrast and inequality in the vocative position (based on English fiction)

This paper aims at analysis of stylistic devices based on semantic contrast and inequality actualized in the vocative position. The subject of the study is functioning of the given vocatives in literary texts. The author used methods of semantic, contextual analysis and elements of pragmatic analysis. The results of the study. Ironic forms of address were firstly analysed among contrastive vocatives. They often include evaluative component of connotation. Depending on the context this component of connotation may change its meaning from negative to positive and vice versa. Cases of non-referential use of address forms for creating ironic meaning are also discussed. During the analysis of address forms based on oxymoron certain postulates of M. V. Nikitin's theory of semantic combinatorics are used. The findings indicate that contradictory relations may exist not only inside a vocative syntagm, but also between the vocative and the rest of the utterance. In addition to that, semantic and stylistic types of such contradictoriness are characterized. Moreover, types of gradation and frequency of their actualization in the vocative position are analyzed. Besides that, variants of gradation components positioning in the text are revealed. The role of authorial text in the adequate interpretation of emotional and evaluative address forms — components of gradation — is defined. The usage of all of the above mentioned stylistic devices in the vocative position is combined with the evaluative component of connotation, highlighting positive or negative attitude of the speaker to the addressee and certain reaction of the speaker to the concrete communicative situation, addressee's words or behaviour. Further study of address forms may be promising in their interrelation with other means expressing the category of speech addressability, in revealing their genre specificity and characteristic features of other stylistic devices actualization in the vocative position.

Referential and pragmatic-discourse properties of Lithuanian reference impersonals: 2sg-imp, 3-imp and ma/ta-imp

In this paper I describe the semantics, pragmatics and the discourse functions of three Lithuanian agent-defocusing constructions, featuring the non-referential use of second person singular/third person verbal forms and the non-agreeing participial forms in ma/ta. These three constructions can all be defined as impersonal, in the broader sense of the word, as the agent (or the main participant, whatever its semantic role may be) is constructed as non-referential: I label them 2sg-imp, 3-imp and ma/ta-imp. My corpus consists of original Lithuanian texts (a short story and entries on an Internet forum) and of the Lithuanian translations of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella Le Petit Prince and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. My analysis shows that 2sg-imp are preferably used to express generic agents (anyone) and 3-imp are preferably used to express referential indefinite agents (someone). while ma/ta-imp are referentially flexible. 2sg-imp are pragmatically marked in that they are used to express empathy between the speaker and the pool of potential referents; they are mostly used in specific discourse types, such as opinion statements and life drama situations. 3-imp are preferred in situations where the indefiniteness of the agent is relevant to the development of the narrative; ma/ta-imp are instead preferred when the agent is irrelevant, and the focus is on the event itself. The behavior of Lithuanian 2sg-imp, 3-imp and ma/ta-imp is consistent with the one already described for similar constructions in other European languages.

Pre-task planning and discourse cohesion: Analysis of Chinese EFL learners’ referential use in oral narratives

While the research on pretask planning has concentrated on its effects on learners’ task performance in terms of fluency, accuracy, and complexity, its possible influence on the overall discourse level, such as discourse management and coherence, has been largely ignored. The present study addresses the inadequacy by uncovering the potential effects of pretask planning on Chinese EFL (English as a foreign language) learners’ selection of referential expressions in oral narratives. Fifty-six intermediate-level learners were tasked with retelling the story of Modern Times under one of two conditions, that is, either with 10-minutes strategic planning or without any planning time. An additional 25 native speakers (NSs) also narrated the same story under the same task conditions. Their narratives were audio recorded, transcribed, and coded based on a coding scheme that distinguished the roles of characters, types of reference, and discursive status of reference. A combination of statistical analysis and discourse analysis showed that (1) compared with NSs, the EFL learners were overexplicit in using noun phrases and proper names to refer to singular characters, but not so in joint reference to the major characters; and (2) pretask planning facilitated more target-like selection of referential expressions when major characters were referred to, although it did not bring the learners’ performance up to NS standards. However, the impact of planning time on referential use seemed to be moderated by the role prominence. These findings were explained within the framework of Levelt’s speech production model and Skehan’s Limited Attentional Capacity Hypothesis.

A Second Gestural Revolution and Gesturing Hands in Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, Mary Wigman, and Tilly Losch

This chapter has two aims: to trace in more detail gestural dance’s ability to realize what Susan Leigh Foster calls “physicality as a discourse”; and to show how modernist dance reflects upon this discursiveness through the pronounced and sometimes self-referential use of hands. Addressing modernist choreography as a second gestural revolution, the chapter argues that it constitutes a recovery, on its own terms, of the meaningful corporeality that was established by the first gestural revolution of the eighteenth-century ballet reform. In order to test Jacques Rancière’s modernist aesthetic of the autonomous subject on a set of examples, the chapter also explores Hilde Doepp’s 1926 book Träume und Masken (Dreams and Masks), Rainer Maria Rilke’s writings on Auguste Rodin, photographs of hands by Albert Renger-Patzsch and Charlotte Rudolph, and the queer aesthetic of Tilly Losch’s Tanz der Hände (Dance of the Hands).

On the essentiality of thoughts (and reference)

It is often assumed that experiential reference, in particular the references we make using so-called essential indexicals (I, here, and now), is irreducible to other forms or reference. In focusing on Donnellan’s insights concerning the referential use of definite descriptions and empirical evidence coming from cognitive sciences (in particular Pylyshin’s work on situated vision), Eros Corazza discusses and defends this view. In so doing, he shows how experiential reference rests on a form of egocentric immersion underpinning agent-centered behaviours. It is further argued that our capacity to express de se thoughts (i.e. thoughts about ourselves) supervenes on the ability we have to master viewpoint-dependent thoughts. This constitutes the cognitive grounds upon which philosophical insights concerning the notions of essential indexicals, self-locating beliefs, and self-centered behaviours should be understood.

Semantic Ambiguity Explained in the Framework of Cognitive Economy

In “Context and Communication” Stephen Neale argues that the referential use of descriptions differs from the attributive use only in the pragmatics, making referential descriptions applicable to Russellian analysis. Marga Reimer disagrees with Neale’s view and argues that the difference is in the semantics, making referential descriptions semantically ambiguous. In this paper, I argue that Neale’s Modified Occam’s Razor overlooks the behavioral data of how we actually use language. I attempt to accommodate the strength of both Neale’s and Reimer’s explanations, putting them in a framework governed by the principle of cognitive economy