We present an exploratory study of 2- to 3-year-old children’s acquisition the demonstrative system Eegimaa (ISO 369–3 bqj), endangered language belonging Jóola cluster Atlantic family Niger-Congo phylum, spoken by about 13,000 speakers in southwestern Senegal. demonstratives express distance from speaker (proximal, medial and distal) agreement categories number gender, as well having four morp...

The debate on context dependence of expressions has many roots: the logicphilosophical tradition, starting with Gottlob Frege and his context principle, has developed– with David Kaplan – a paradigm of formal semantics of context-dependent expressions like indexicals and demonstratives. The debate on commonsense reasoning – starting with John McCarthy – has produced a great amount of works on c...

Lakoff (1974) argues that affective demonstratives in English are markers of solidarity, with exclamative overtones deriving from their close association with evaluative predication. Focusing on this, we seek to inform these claims using quantitative corpus evidence. Our experiments suggest that affectivity is not limited to specific uses of this, but rather that it arises in a wide range of li...

There is an ongoing debate about the meaning of definiteness and the number and types of definite entities (e.g. Russell, 1905; Strawson, 1950; Hawkins, 1978; Löbner, 1985; and many others). Definite noun phrases (NPs) include definite descriptions, demonstratives, pronouns, possessive constructions, proper names, or NPs with a universal quantifier as determiner, and research has focused on whi...

This paper describes a model for coreference resolution integrated within a general anaphora resolution engine. We focus on finding coreference chains in unrestricted text, considering all mentions of entities, expressed as noun-phrases, different types of pronouns (including demonstratives and wh-pronouns) and even numerals. We have experimented with texts from the belletristic register. We ha...

Signed languages display a variety of pointing signs that serve the functions of deictic and anaphoric pronouns, possessive and reflexive pronouns, demonstratives, locatives, determiners, body part labels, and verb agreement. We consider criteria for determining the linguistic status of pointing signs. Among those criteria are conventionality, indexicality, phonological compositionality, being ...

It is shown that pairs of demonstratives in which there is a vocalic opposition have an advantage in their struggle for existence in languages when F2’ is higher in the proximal than in the distal form. It is also shown that nasals are preferred in first person pronouns while stops and other obstruents are preferred in second person pronouns. Explanations are suggested for both findings. They i...