Testing predictions of the Givenness Hierarchy framework: A crosslinguistic investigation

Gundel, Jeanette K.; Bassene, Mamadou; Gordon, Bryan James; Humnick, Linda; Khalfaoui, Amel

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2009.09.010

Cited by 24 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…They use a mixture of corpus and introspective data. However, their intuitions of Tunisian Arabic (Gundel et al, 2010(Gundel et al, :1782 appear to rule out a class of subjects that are frequent in our corpus, namely null subjects whose referents have been evoked in discourse but do not occur in the previous clause. Dahlgren (1998) and Brustad (2000) are further studies, though there are none, to our knowledge, whose explicit goal has been to reconcile the discourse status of both overt and null subject clauses in spoken Arabic.…”

Section: S U B J E C T R E a L I Z A T I O N I N S P O K E N A R A B I Cmentioning

confidence: 72%

“…In a short study, using a rich set of discourse status categories, Gundel, Bassene, Gordon, Humnick, and Khalfaoui (2010) classified a referring expression as being in focus, activated, familiar, uniquely identifiable, referential, or type identifiable. They use a mixture of corpus and introspective data.…”

Section: S U B J E C T R E a L I Z A T I O N I N S P O K E N A R A B I Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Subject expression and discourse embeddedness in Emirati Arabic

2013

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Since Prince (1981) and Givón (1983), studies on discourse reference have explained the grammatical realization of referents in terms of general concepts such as “assumed familiarity” or “discourse coherence.” In this paper, we develop a complementary approach based on a detailed statistical tracking of subjects in Emirati Arabic, from which two major categories of subject expression emerge. On the one hand, null subjects are opposed to overt ones; on the other, subject-verb (SV) is opposed to verb-subject (VS). Although null subjects strongly correlate with coreferentiality with the subject of the previous clause, they can also index more distant referents within a single episode. With respect to SV vs. VS, morpholexical classes are found to be biased toward one or the other: nouns are typically VS, pronouns SV. We conclude that the null subject variant is the norm in Emirati Arabic, and when an overt subject is appropriate, lexical identity biases the subject into SV or VS order, generating word order as a discourse-relevant parameter. Overall, our approach attempts to understand Arabic discourse from a microlevel perspective.

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Section: S U B J E C T R E a L I Z A T I O N I N S P O K E N A R A B I Cmentioning

confidence: 72%

Section: S U B J E C T R E a L I Z A T I O N I N S P O K E N A R A B I Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

Subject expression and discourse embeddedness in Emirati Arabic

2013

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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%

“…However, in my view, not only speaker's knowledge about the referent but also how much knowledge and attention to the referent that the hearer has had before the referent is indicated plays an important role in using a particular referring device, given that referring is a collaborative process (H. H. Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986). Many studies have agreed that the choice of a referring expression is determined by the speaker's assumption about the common ground between the speaker and the hearer at the point where the nominal form is encountered (Gundel et al, 2010;Gundel et al, 1993;Prince, 1981). Without considering the effect on the hearer when choosing a referring expression, Adachi's proposal faces a problem when explaining the pattern of using distal demonstratives in the language.…”

Section: Difference Between đấY/đó (ấY) and Kiamentioning

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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“…religion, law, etc. ), and (3) tenor (the social role relationships between the language users in a particular situation (teacher-pupil, parent-child) (Coates & Wade, 2004;Evaldsson, 2005;Halford & Leonard, 2006).…”

Section: Register Studies and The Study Of Stylistic Variationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perfecting the Theory of Meaning: The Story of Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis

El-dali¹

2019

ASSC

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The common sense view of what language is for is that language is used for communication. However, some of the most prominent linguists in the field reject this view. In other words, the majority of professional linguists used to adopt a view of language which is at odds with the view held by non-linguists. The phenomenon of communication has often been thought of as peripheral in linguistic research. This view is a result of the strong hold the abstract objectivist language conception has had on modern linguistic thought. Communication has been reduced to a subordinate place amongst the possible functions of language. This low status attributed to communication is challenged by different pragmatic approaches to language. On the other hand, the content and use of the term “communication” is even by humanistic standards extremely ambiguous, and it has, therefore, often been difficult to use in practical, empirical work. This study is primarily a deep survey of the major contributions of both “discourse analysis” and “pragmatics” in an attempt to clarify the problem of understanding meaning in language use. In addition, it attempts to show how language is used, as a persuasive tool, in political discourse.The present study demonstrates that it would be a mistake to adopt an approach to pragmatics and discourse analysis which focuses on linguistic factors alone, or social factors alone, to the exclusion of cognitive factors. Also, it would be a mistake to adopt an approach which is exclusively speaker-oriented or exclusively hearer-oriented. The process of making meaning is a joint accomplishment between speaker and hearer; between writer and reader. In addition, the present study shows that both disciplines “pragmatics” and “discourse analysis” are hybrid fields of inquiry; and their common themes are “language”, “language users”, “communication”, and “meaning in interaction”. Both disciplines have borrowed their theoretical and methodological orientations from almost the same social and human disciplines. Accordingly, the terms “pragmatics” and “discourse analysis” can be used interchangeably. Finally, the present study shows that political speech is one of the main persuasive tools used by politicians to present their political persons and to further their political agendas.

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Testing predictions of the Givenness Hierarchy framework: A crosslinguistic investigation

Cited by 24 publications

References 5 publications

Subject expression and discourse embeddedness in Emirati Arabic

Subject expression and discourse embeddedness in Emirati Arabic

Vietnamese demonstratives: A spatially-based polysemy network

Perfecting the Theory of Meaning: The Story of Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis

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