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Demonstrative Pronouns in Spanish: a Discourse-Based Study

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DEMONSTRATIVE PRONOUNS IN SPANISH: A DISCOURSE-BASED STUDY DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Iker Zulaica Hernández, M.A. ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ The Ohio State University 2007 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach, Adviser Professor Fernando Martínez-Gil ______________________________ Professor John Grinstead Adviser Graduate Program in Spanish and Portuguese Copyright by Iker Zulaica Hernández 2007 ABSTRACT Like other demonstrative expressions, Spanish neuter demonstrative pronouns can only be fully understood when we consider their essential discourse nature. But what make these linguistic elements special when compared to other demonstratives is their very specific referential preferences. Neuter demonstrative pronouns ‘esto’, ‘eso’ and ‘aquello’ are commonly used in discourse to refer to a particular set of higher-order, discourse entities: the so-called abstract entities. These include propositional objects and eventualities of various types that are frequently found within sentential limits. But other times, these semantic objects stretch beyond the sentence to be only found in larger pieces of discourse. These basic issues, largely ignored in the studies of Spanish linguistics so far, are fully addressed in this dissertation. Thus, a corpus study is carried out with an aim at uncovering the speaker’s preferences regarding the referential features of Spanish demonstrative pronouns and a detailed study provided that explores into the morphosyntactic and semantic nature of their most common abstract referents. As these elements lack any sort of explicit ostension, Spanish demonstrative pronouns have been traditionally considered as not belonging in the group of deictic expressions. As a consequence of that, only their pronominal nature has been taken into consideration when applied to their discourse behavior. ii Here, I provide a characterization for Spanish demonstrative pronouns as generalized quantifiers and defend the idea that these elements still retain a deictic component that would allow me to group them on a par with demonstrative determiners. This deictic component that demonstrative pronouns have, though clearly not in the form of an overt pointing act in the canonical sense, is rather conceived of as presuppositional in nature. It is still a pointing device which serves the function of directing the hearer to look for the pronoun’s referent in the set of familiar discourse referents while allowing the speaker to mark it as cognitively activated. Based on the speaker’s referential preferences when it comes to make use of demonstrative pronouns to anaphorically refer in discourse to eventualities, and attested by a corpus study carried out with that purpose, I also defend the idea that while demonstrative pronouns ‘esto’ and ‘eso’ seem to have lost any trace of a [± proximity] spatio-temporal condition, demonstrative pronoun ‘aquello’ is still marked with a [+ distal] feature. This content, which is also modeled in terms of setting-up presuppositional DRSs for demonstrative pronouns, it also allowed me to postulate a reduction of the tripartite system of Spanish demonstrative pronouns into a basic binary system whereby ‘esto’ and ‘eso’ would be grouped together as being unspecified with respect to proximity and ‘aquello’ being the term most frequently used in modern Spanish to mark distance in the spatio-temporal axis. iii Dedicado a mis padres iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank my academic adviser Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach for all the patience, intellectual advice, insightful comments and research help throughout all these years. Without his help this dissertation would have been impossible. I also want to thank the other members of my dissertation defense committee; Fernando Martínez Gil and John Grinstead, for discussing with me various aspects that greatly helped me improve the final document. I also want to thank professors Dieter Wanner, Scott Schwenter and Wayne Redenbarger of the linguistics program in the department of Spanish and Professor Craige Roberts from the department of linguistics at the Ohio State University for their help, cooperation and all the knowledge I gained from their classes and advice over these years. v VITA January 9, 1970 ................................................. Born – Barakaldo, Spain 1993 ................................................................... Licenciatura Filología Inglesa, Universidad de Alicante (Spain) 2002 ................................................................... M. A. Hispanic Linguistics, The Ohio State University 2002- present .................................................... Graduate Teaching Assistant, The Ohio State University PUBLICATIONS Research Publications 1. I. Zulaica, “Temporal and Spatial Schemata for Neuter Demonstrative Expressions.” In Proceedings of the panel The Language of Space and Time at the 10th International Pragmatics Conference. Göteborg, Sweden, (2007). 2. J. Gutierrez-Rexach and I. Zulaica, “Abstract Reference and Neuter Demonstratives in Spanish.” In Antonio Branco et al. (eds.), Proceedings of DAARC 2007, The 6th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium, Centro da Linguistica da Universidad do Porto: Portugal, (2006). 3. J. Gutierrez-Rexach and I. Zulaica, “Demonstrative Contrast and Demonstrative Use in Discourse: A DRT Approach.” In Candy Sidner et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Constraints in Discourse (CID06). Maynooth: Ireland, (2006). vi 4. S. Schwenter and I. Zulaica, “On the Contextual Licensing of Tampoco.” In S. Montrul and F. Ordoñez (eds.) Linguistic Theory and Language Development in Hispanic Languages: Papers from the 5th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium and the 4th Conference on the Acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese. Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, (2002). FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Graduate Program in Spanish and Portuguese vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ..............................................................................................................................ii Dedication ..........................................................................................................................iv Acknowledgments ..............................................................................................................v Vita ....................................................................................................................................vi List of Tables ..................................................................................................................... x List of Figures ...................................................................................................................xii Chapters 1. Introduction .......................................................................................................1 2. A Survey of Abstract Objects Antecedents in Spanish....................................51 2.1 Eventualities ..............................................................................................53 2.2 Nominals and Nominalization Processes ..................................................65 2.2.1 The Optionality of Arguments .............................................88 2.3 Small Clauses ............................................................................................95 2.4 A Unified Treatment for Infinitives, Gerunds and Other Propositional Expressions ...............................................................................................99 2.5 Event Types and Discourse Anaphora ....................................................103 2.6 Attitudinal Objects ..................................................................................104 2.7 Attitude Reports ......................................................................................115 2.8 Proposition Anaphora .............................................................................121 3. The Content of Spanish Demonstrative Pronouns .......................................128 3.1 Demonstrative Expressions and Their Deicitic Nature ..........................129 3.2 Neuter Demonstrative Pronouns as Generalized Quantifiers .................148 3.3 A Study of Demonstrative eso in Conversation .....................................177 viii Page 4. A Corpus-based Study of Demonstrative Pronouns ....................................182 4.1 Preliminaries ..........................................................................................182 4.2 A Study of Demonstrative Pronouns in Spoken Discourse ...................187 4.3 A Study of Demonstrative Pronouns in Written Discourse ...................205 5. Discourse Anaphoric Reference and Temporal Perspective ........................215 5.1 The Co-occurrence Pattern of Tense and Demonstration in Discourse ................................................................................................217 5.2 The Deictic and Anaphoric Nature of Tense and Demonstrative Systems ...................................................................................................227 5.3 Reference to Events in Discourse: A Corpus Study ...............................241 5.4 A Proposal for a Reduction of the Tripartite System of Spanish Demonstrative Pronouns .........................................................................253 6. Conclusions and Future Prospects ................................................................259
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