Definite descriptions and cognitive status in English: why accommodation is unnecessary
نویسندگان
چکیده
منابع مشابه
Definite Descriptions and Cognitive Status in English: Why Accommodation is Unnecessary
A commonly held view of English definite articles is that they signal that the referent of an NP is familiar to the addressee. However, it is well known that not all definite article phrases meet this familiarity requirement. To account for such non-familiar uses, Heim (1982) invokes the mechanism of ‘accommodation’, which enables an addressee to remedy a violation of the familiarity requiremen...
متن کاملWhy Incomplete Definite Descriptions do not Defeat Russell’s Theory of Descriptions
For Russell, a simple sentence containing a description, the F, is true only if a single object satisfies F. Sentences containing incomplete descriptions pose problems because they are often used to express truths, even though more than one thing in the discourse satisfies F. It is argued (i) that non-Russellian analyses cannot solve these problems, and (ii) that Russellian analyses can, prov...
متن کاملDemonstratives, Definite Descriptions and Definiteness∗
Kaplan (1989) showed us that demonstratives are special for two reasons. First, they are connected to the context: the “canonical” uses of demonstratives (to adopt Roberts’s (2002) terminology) are associated with demonstrations, extralinguistic acts that determine the reference. Second, they’re a particularly clear case of constituents with what Kaplan calls “prepropositional” content – that i...
متن کاملThe or That: Definite and Demonstrative Descriptions in Second Language Acquisition
Since Heubner's (1985) pioneering study, there have been many studies on (mis) use/ non-use of articles by L2 learners from article-less and article languages. The present study investigated how Persian L2 learners of English produce and interpret English definite descriptions and demonstrative descriptions. It was assumed that definite and demonstrative descriptions share the same central sema...
متن کاملProcessing definite descriptions in corpora
We discuss in this paper a system that resolves definite descriptions in written texts. A preliminary study of definite descriptions in a collection of 20 texts revealed that about 30% of the 1040 definites in the collection were cases of anaphoric definites whose antecedents had the same head noun, and 50% introduced novel discourse referents. An algorithm which resolves anaphoric definite des...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
ژورنال
عنوان ژورنال: English Language and Linguistics
سال: 2001
ISSN: 1360-6743,1469-4379
DOI: 10.1017/s1360674301000247