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...

abstractsince 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 centra...

Building on [1] and [2], [3] argues for a ‘division of pragmatic labor’: as a result of general pragmatic interactions, unmarked expressions are generally used to convey unmarked messages and marked expressions are generally used to convey marked messages (see also [4, 5]). [6] explicitly splits this into two separate pressures (“What is expressed simply is stereotypically identified” and “What...

There is a large body of research indicating that speakers of (familiar) European languages tend to encode and conceptualize space from an egocentric perspective, but linguistic fieldworkers have shown that speakers of certain other languages (e.g. Tzeltal) often describe the same spatial scenes based on fixed coordinates of the environment. This has led some researcher to challenge longstandin...

Kaplan’s theory of demonstratives and deicticals Kaplan (1989a,b) can be briefly stated as follows. Expressions of this kind depend for their interpretation on the context of utterance and in a context of utterance they refer directly to whatever they refer to. Direct reference in turn consists in two properties. The first property is the absence of a Fregean sense. The context does its work on...

In his seminal work, “Demonstratives”, David Kaplan shows how to define validity (or logical truth) for a language containing indexical expressions such as ‘I’, ‘now’, ‘today’, ‘that’, and others. Kaplan’s great insight in that work is that the indices for context and for circumstances of evaluation (which Kaplan takes to be time and world) play conceptually distinct roles in semantics. To capt...

Abstract Endophoric demonstratives such as this and that are among the most frequently used words in written texts. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how exactly they should be subdivided classified terms of their different types use. Here, we develop a new taxonomy endophoric based on large-scale corpus including three genres: news items, encyclopedic texts, book reviews. The enables analysts t...