Specificity and Referential Persistence – An Experimental Study of Indefinites in German
نویسندگان
چکیده
Indefinite noun phrases introduce new discourse referents equipped with different referential and discourse properties. Indefinites can show wide or narrow scope behavior and they can be interpreted as specific or non-specific. Indefinites also show different discourse effects such as different degrees of discourse prominence. In this paper we present the results of two psycholinguistic pilot studies. We present new empirical evidence that German indefinites with the indefinite article ein (‘a(n)’) and with the indefinite demonstrative dieser (‘this’) show different degrees of discourse prominence. The high discourse prominence of dieser can be correlated with the referential property of being specific, while the lower discourse prominence of the indefinite article ein corresponds to the lower likelihood of being specific.
منابع مشابه
Indefinite Demonstrative Dieser in German
This work offers experimental support for the hypothesis that some indefinite noun phrases do not only introduce new referents but also equip them with a certain ‘forward-looking potential’ which informs the hearer about the ‘importance’ of the referent in the subsequent discourse. Developing means to empirically account for the intuitions that exist with respect to English this-indefinites, I ...
متن کاملKlaus Von Heusinger
Specific indefinite noun phrases are prototypically referential expressions, show wide scope, are presuppositional, and indicate discourse prominence or “noteworthiness”. However, not all specific indefinites show these properties. The existence of so-called “narrow scope specific” or “relative specific” indefinites demonstrates that specificity cannot be explained by the wide scope of specific...
متن کاملOn Shared Indefinite NPs in Coordinative Structures
Indefinite NPs in shared constituents in coordinative structures in German exhibit different referential options with respect to scope and specificity. These options are restricted by the informational status of the indefinite: A focused indefinite NP can receive all referential options, while a non-focused one can only get the narrow scope non-specific reading. Our analysis assumes that the in...
متن کاملAn Experimental Investigation of the Semantics and Pragmatics of Specificity
There are many different theories of specificity in the semantic literature. These include specificity as scope (Ioup 1977, among others), specificity as referentiality (Fodor and Sag 1982), specificity as a choice function reading (Reinhart 1997, Winter 1997, Kratzer 1998, among many others), and specificity as speaker identifiability (Groenendijk & Stokhof 1980). Importantly, theories of spec...
متن کاملWhat Makes Choice Natural?
The idea to use choice functions in the semantic analysis of indefinites has recently gained increasing attention among linguists and logicians. A central linguistic motivation for the revived interest in this logical perspective, which can be traced back to the epsilon calculus of Hilbert & Bernays (1939), is the observation by Reinhart (1992, 1997) that choice functions can account for the pr...
متن کامل