Free Indirect Discourse and 'De Re' Pronouns

Free indirect discourse in newspaper reports

It has recently been noted (Onrust 1994) that two journalists at the Dutch daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad have introduced a new style of reporting on soccer and other ball games. Their articles present a mix of factual reporting of events, background information, interviews and commentary, employing a variety of literary techniques. Most notably, reactions and opinions are often reported in th...

The semantics of person and de se effects in free indirect discourse

In this contribution we will address the main puzzling empirical issues that have been formulated around Free Indirect Discourse (FID): the constraints on the use of first person pronouns and of proper names (as well as of definite descriptions), the reasons why different grammatical features (person, gender, number) give rise to presuppositions that must be resolved at different levels of inte...

Demonstrative Pronouns in Natural Discourse

We examine demonstrative pronouns in a portion of the Santa Barbara Corpus of American English and propose a coding scheme that classifies pronouns with nominal as well as non-nominal antecedents into direct and indirect, depending on whether their referent is the same as the referent/denotation of the antecedent. In agreement with previous studies, we find that demonstratives more often have n...

De re and De dicto Modality in Islamic Traditional Logic

Zero Pronouns as Experiencer in Japanese Discourse

The process of finding the antecedent of zero pronoun, that is indispensable to Japanese language understanding, is the topic of this paper. Here we mainly concern with discourses comprising two sentences that are in a subordinate relation, especially one of them describes the agent's volitional action and the other describes the reason of the action. We propose basically two new principles: (1...