‘Shared knowledge’ and topicality

Gundel, Jeanette K.

doi:10.1016/0378-2166(85)90049-9

Cited by 169 publications

(63 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Hedberg's notion of topic is based on the idea that the topic encapsulates what the sentence is "about," and that individual sentence topics determine what is the topic of the discourse at the time at which they occur. Hedberg (1990: 20) further notes that topics are "given" in the discourse, in the sense that they conform to Gundel's (1985) "topic-familiarity condition." This is stated as follows:…”

Section: Two Types Of It-cleftmentioning

confidence: 99%

Syntactic constraints on discourse structure: the case of it-clefts

Delin¹,

Oberlander²

1995

Ling

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Section: Two Types Of It-cleftmentioning

confidence: 99%

Syntactic constraints on discourse structure: the case of it-clefts

Delin¹,

Oberlander²

1995

Ling

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“…Recent research places more emphasis on the factor of the hearer's attention in the analysis of demonstratives (Enfield, 2003;Gundel, 1985;Gundel et al, 2010;Gundel et al, 1988;Gundel, Hedberg, & Zacharski, 1993;Gundel et al, 2004;Gundel, Hegarty, & Borthen, 2003;Oh, 2001;Strauss, 1993Strauss, , 2002. These studies argue that uses of demonstratives are not always determined by the notion of distance, but also by the cognitive status of referents.…”

Section: Demonstratives In Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

Vietnamese demonstratives: A spatially-based polysemy network

Bui¹

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For all human beings, a crucial function of language is to draw attention to things in the world. Like most languages, Vietnamese has its set of 'pointing words' that fulfil this function, including này 'this', đây 'this/here ' and đấy, đó, kia 'that/there', ấy 'that', and nọ 'that'. Though the meaning of these seven words has expanded and changed over time, all of them originally served to orient the hearer's attention to something proximal or distal to the speaker's location. These words are termed demonstratives in English or chỉ định từ in Vietnamese.Chỉ định từ currently play a wide range of syntactic and semantic roles. They can occur as the determiner in a noun phrase (nhà này 'this house', nhà ấy/kia/nọ 'that house') or appear on their own as either pronominals (đây/đấy, đó, kia là nhà tôi 'this/that is my house') or as locative adverbs (lại đây 'come here', đến đấy/đó/kia 'go there'). In the appropriate syntactic environments, these terms allow the speaker to 'point' not only to specific objects but also to abstract, invisible concepts that are present, distant, remembered or imagined. Despite the wide range of uses of chỉ định từ, an exhaustive analysis of their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic functions has previously been lacking in Vietnamese.Even a cursory analysis of the seven Vietnamese demonstratives reveals that each has not just one meaning or sense, but rather a complex network of related senses, or polysemy network. For example, the demonstrative ấy has thirteen different senses, including the function of indicating the position of a referent in space (a spatial sense), preceding discourse (an anaphoric sense) or in the memory of the speaker and/or hearer (as in recognitional, presentational, place holder, or avoidance usages). In addition, ấy has extended senses indicating person deixis, discourse cohesion, modality and interjective usages.Unquestionably, the form ấy has a wide variety of uses in Vietnamese. Is it coincidence that these uses share the same form ấy? If that were the case, the uses of ấy would be unconnected homonymous meanings. Or are these uses somehow related? If so, then the uses of ấy are polysemous senses, and it should be possible to trace how each sense evolved from another, ultimately tracking the evolution of the polysemy network back to a single ancestral sense.This study analyses the form and function of chỉ định từ as found in a range of written texts, and finds that the various functions of Vietnamese demonstratives are related. The extensions responsible for the current range of demonstrative functions follow recognised paths of metaphoric and metonymic change, so that these changes can be reconstructed from synchronic data even in the ii absence of direct historical evidence.Although all of the seven demonstratives are argued to be polysemous as the result of semantic extensions, each demonstrative has followed its own path of change and no two demonstratives have identical polysemy networks. These differences are due both to the individual semantics...

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“…The discourse function underlying the left dislocation construction in English has received significant attention (Ross, 1967;Gundel, 1985;Geluykens, 1992). A left dislocated NP is one appearing in an initial pre-clausal position that is coreferential with a personal pronoun that occurs elsewhere in the clause.…”

Section: The Discourse Function Of Left Dislocationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Were the sentence in canonical form, the left dislocated material would have been in subject position: my sister Chrissie's eyes were poppin' out. Prince makes use of Gundel's (1985) and Reinhart's (1981) (5) Simplifying Left Dislocation A 'Simplifying' Left Dislocation serves to simplify the discourse processing of discourse-new entities by removing the NPs evoking them from a syntactic position disfavored for NPs evoking discourse-new entities and creating a separate processing unit for them. (Prince, 1998:6) A second function of left dislocation, according to Prince, is entirely distinct from the simplifying role.…”

Section: (4)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Unexpected left dislocation: An English Corpus Study

Manetta

2007

Journal of Pragmatics

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The discourse function of the syntactic construction left dislocation in English has received significant attention. Prior research has identified at least three distinct form-function correlations underlying left dislocation. This paper examines left dislocation tokens from a corpus of spoken English recorded in South Philadelphia. From this emerges a fourth type of left dislocation not previously identified. We define this variety of left dislocation, termed the Unexpected Subject type, via a Centering Theory analysis of the surrounding discourse. This finding adds even greater diversity to the potential discourse functions underlying the left dislocation construction, and thus lends important support to the claim that the association between syntactic form and discourse function is arbitrary. Future research utilizing much larger corpora will not only allow us to hone the definition of the Unexpected Subject type, but may also reveal that there are indeed more discourse functions of the left dislocation construction that have not been identified. #

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‘Shared knowledge’ and topicality

Cited by 169 publications

References 10 publications

Syntactic constraints on discourse structure: the case of it-clefts

Syntactic constraints on discourse structure: the case of it-clefts

Vietnamese demonstratives: A spatially-based polysemy network

Unexpected left dislocation: An English Corpus Study

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