Speyer (2008) finds an overall decline in the rate of topicalization in historical English, which we refer to pretheoretically as direct object fronting. He attributes it to two separate phenomena: 1) the early loss of unaccented pronominal and demonstrative fronting, and 2) a gradient decline in the use of accented, contrastive fronting due to prosodic well-formedness conditions imposed by the...

Logic and linguistically-informed philosophy of language are becoming increasingly specialised disciplines. I think this is a consequence of the fact that each is making rapid progress, but it has as a consequence that it has become less routine for someone who is doing cutting-edge work on central topics in the one to also be doing cutting-edge work on central topics in the other. As a result,...

Personal pronouns and demonstratives contribute differently to the encoding of information in the mental model and they serve distinct backward- and forward-looking functions. While (unstressed) personal pronouns are the default means to indicate coreference with the most prominent discourse entity (backward-looking function) and typically mark the maintenance of the current topic, demonstrativ...

This paper presents the results of a multilingual corpus study on definite descriptions and demonstrative noun phrases. The analysis made on a parallel corpus (French and Portuguese) reinforces previous findings regarding the predominance of non-anaphoric uses of definite descriptions in English corpus. It is also shown that the use of demonstrative noun phrases, on the other hand, is more regu...

This study aims at exploring demonstratives in two dialects: Hodeidi Yemeni Arabic and Taizi Arabic, comparing them to Modern Standard Arabic. The description of the dialects along with focused on tracing syntactic semantic evidence they are like exhibit. model used undertake analysis follows Diessel (1999). Although attracted considerable scholarly attention, literature reflects a scarcity res...

Referential cohesion in African languages is a largely neglected area of study. Given the foregoing, this study, theoretically anchored on Descriptive Translation Studies and Halliday Hasan’s (1976) seminal model, explores referential translation English-Swahili healthcare texts with an endeavour to describe its use establish if there variation when are translated. Cohesion fundamental since it...