Space and demonstratives: an experiment with Estonian exophoric demonstratives

Spatial Demonstratives, Perceptual Space, and Linguistic Diversity

Extended Abstract Communication involves a combination of speech and gestures, which afford joint attention between speaker and interlocutor (Tomasello, 1999, 2003; Kita, 2003). Characterizing the mapping between language and the vision and action systems is therefore essential in order to understand both normal and disordered communication. In a series of five experiments we target this mappin...

On the referential properties of Estonian pronouns and demonstratives

Annotating Korean Demonstratives

This paper presents preliminary work on a corpus-based study of Korean demonstratives. Through the development of an annotation scheme and the use of spoken and written corpora, we aim to determine different functions of demonstratives and to examine their distributional properties. Our corpus study adopts similar features of annotation used in Botley and McEnery (2001) and provides some lingui...

Contexts, Demonstratives, and Validity

In his seminal work, “Demonstratives”, David Kaplan shows how to define validity (or logical truth) for a language containing indexical expressions such as ‘I’, ‘now’, ‘today’, ‘that’, and others. Kaplan’s great insight in that work is that the indices for context and for circumstances of evaluation (which Kaplan takes to be time and world) play conceptually distinct roles in semantics. To capt...

Demonstratives in Philosophy and Linguistics

Demonstrative noun phrases (e.g., that guy, this) are of interest to philosophers of language and semanticists because they are sensitive to demonstrations or speaker intentions. The interpretation of a demonstrative therefore sheds light on the role of the context in natural language semantics. This survey reviews two types of approaches to demonstratives: Kaplan’s direct reference treatment o...