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Questions Under Discussion: from Sentence to Discourse∗
Questions under Discussion: From sentence to discourse∗ Anton Benz Katja Jasinskaja July 14, 2016 Abstract Questions under discussion (QUD) is an analytic tool that has recently become more and more popular among linguists and language philosophers as a way to characterize how a sentence fits in its context. The idea is that each sentence in discourse addresses a (of- ten implicit) QUD either by answering it, or by bringing up another question that can help answering that QUD. The linguistic form and the interpretation of a sentence, in turn, may depend on the QUD it addresses. The first proponents of the QUD approach (von Stut- terheim & Klein, 1989; van Kuppevelt, 1995) thought of it as a general approach to the analysis of discourse structure where structural relations between sentences in a coherent discourse are understood in terms of relations between questions they address. However, the idea did not find broad application in discourse structure analysis, where theories aiming at logical discourse representations are predominantly based on the notion of coherence re- lations (Mann & Thompson, 1988; Hobbs, 1985; Asher & Lascarides, 2003). The problem of finding overt markers for QUDs means that they are also difficult to utilize for quanti- tative measures of discourse coherence (McNamara et al., 2010). At the same time QUD proved useful in the analysis of a wide range of linguistic phenomena including accentua- tion, discourse particles, presuppositions and implicatures. The goal of this special issue is to bring together cutting-edge research that demonstrates the success of QUD in linguistics and the need for the development of a comprehensive model of discourse coherence that incorporates the notion of QUD as its integral part. -
Givenness and Its Realization in a Linguistic and in a Non- Linguistic Environment
VILNIUS PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY NATALIJA ZACHAROVA GIVENNESS AND ITS REALIZATION IN A LINGUISTIC AND IN A NON- LINGUISTIC ENVIRONMENT MA Paper Academic advisor: prof. Dr. Hab. Laimutis Valeika Vilnius, 2008 VILNIUS PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY GIVENNESS AND ITS REALIZATION IN A LINGUISTIC AND IN A NON- LINGUISTIC ENVIRONMENT This MA paper is submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of the MA in English Philology By Natalija Zacharova I declare that this study is my own and does not contain any unacknowledged work from any source. (Signature) (Date) Academic advisor: prof. Dr. Hab. Laimutis Valeika (Signature) (Date) Vilnius, 2008 2 CONTENTS ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………….4 INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………...5 1. THE PROBLEMS OF THE INFORMATIONAL STRUCTURE OF THE SENTENCE ……………………………………………………………….8 1.1. The sentence as dialectical entity of given and new……………………...8 1.2. Givenness vs. Newnness………………………………………………….11 1.3. The realization of Givenness……………………………………………..12 1.4. Givenness expressed by the definite article ……………………………..15 1.5. Givenness expressed by the indefinite article…………………………….19 1.6. Givenness expressed by semi-grammatical definite determiners and lexical determiners………………………………………………………..20 2. THE REALIZATION OF GIVENNESS IN A LINGUISTIC ENVIRONMENT……………………………………………………………………21 2.1. Anaphoric Givenness………………………………………………………22 2.2. Cataphoric Givenness……………………………………………………...29 2.3. Givenness expressed by the use of the indefinite article…………………..30 3. THE REALIZATION OF GIVENNESS IN A NON- LINGUISTIC ENVIRONMENT……………………………………………………………………..32 3. 1. The environment of the home……………………………………………...33 3.2. The environment of the town/country, world………………………………35 3.3. The environment of the universe…………………………………………....37 3.4. Cultural environment……………………………………………………….38 4. -
Cross-Dialectal Variability in Propositional Anaphora: a Quantitative and Pragmatic Study of Null Objects in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish
CROSS-DIALECTAL VARIABILITY IN PROPOSITIONAL ANAPHORA: A QUANTITATIVE AND PRAGMATIC STUDY OF NULL OBJECTS IN MEXICAN AND PENINSULAR SPANISH DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Maria Asela Reig, PhD The Ohio State University 2008 Dissertation Committee: Professor Scott A. Schwenter, Adviser Approved by Professor Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza Professor Terrell Morgan Professor Rena Torres-Cacoullos ________________________ Adviser Graduate Program in Spanish and Portuguese ABSTRACT In this dissertation, I analyze the linguistic constraints that condition the variation in Spanish between the null pronoun and the clitic lo referring to a proposition. Previous literature on Spanish has analyzed null objects referring to first order entities, mostly in varieties in contact with other languages. This dissertation contributes to the literature on anaphora in Spanish by establishing and analyzing the existence of propositional null objects in two monolingual dialects, Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. A variationist approach was used to discover the significant constraints on the variation of the null pronoun and the overt clitic lo in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. Following the generalizations from the previous literature on two separate areas of study, anaphora resolution and null objects (Chapter 2), several internal factor groups were included in the coding scheme. In Chapter 3, I provide an explicit statement of the envelope of variation and I specify the coding scheme employed. Chapter 4 offers the results of the multivariate analyses of Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. These results show that some of the linguistic constraints conditioning the variation are shared by both dialects (presence of a dative pronoun, type ii of antecedent, sentence type), suggesting that the null pronoun has the same grammatical role in both dialects. -
Show Business: Deixis in Fifth-Century Athenian Drama
Show Business: Deixis in Fifth-Century Athenian Drama by David Julius Jacobson A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Classics in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Mark Griffith, Chair Professor Donald Mastronarde Professor Leslie Kurke Professor Mary-Kay Gamel Professor Shannon Jackson Spring 2011 Show Business: Deixis in Fifth-Century Athenian Drama Copyright 2011 by David Julius Jacobson Abstract Show Business: Deixis in Fifth-Century Athenian Drama by David Julius Jacobson Doctor of Philosophy in Classics University of California, Berkeley Professor Mark Griffith, Chair In my dissertation I examine the use of deixis in fifth-century Athenian drama to show how a playwright’s lexical choices shape an audience’s engagement with and investment in a dramatic work. The study combines modern performance theories concerning the relationship between actor and audience with a detailed examination of the demonstratives ὅδε and οὗτος in a representative sample of tragedy (and satyr play) and in the full Aristophanic corpus, and reaches conclusions that aid and expand our understanding of both tragedy and comedy. In addition to exploring and interpreting a number of particular scenes for their inter-actor dynamics and staging, I argue overall that tragedy’s predilection for ὅδε , a word which by definition conveys a strong spatio- temporal presence (“this <one> here / now”), pointedly draws the spectators into the dramatic fiction. The comic poet’s preference for οὗτος (“that <one> just mentioned” / “that <one> there”), on the other hand, coupled with his tendency to directly acknowledge the audience individually and in the aggregate, disengages the spectators from the immediacy of the tragic tetralogies and reengages them with the normal, everyday world to which they will return at the close of the festival. -
Exophoric and Endophoric Awareness
Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) Volume.8 Number3 September 2017 Pp. 28-45 DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.24093/awej/vol8no3.3 Exophoric and Endophoric Awareness Mohammad Awwad Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences Lebanese University, Deanship Dekweneh , Beirut, Lebanon Abstract This research aims to shed light on the impact of exophoric and endophoric instruction on the comprehension (decoding) skills, writing (encoding skills), and linguistic awareness of English as Foreign Language learners. In this line, a mixed qualitative quantitative approach was conducted over a period of fifteen weeks on sixty English major students enrolled in their first year at the Lebanese University, fifth branch. The sixty participants were divided into two groups (30 experimental) that benefited from instruction on exophoric and endophoric relations and (30 control) that did not have the opportunity to study referents in the designated period of the research. The participants sat for a reading and writing pretest at the beginning of the study; and they sat again for the same reading and writing assessment at the end of the study. The results of the pre and post tests for both groups were analyzed via SPSS program and findings were as follows: hypothesis one stating that students who are aware of endophoric and exophoric relations are likely to achieve better results in decoding a text than are their peers who receive no referential instruction, was accepted with significant findings. Hypothesis two stating that students who are aware of endophoric and exophoric relations are likely to perform better in writing than their peers who receive no referential instruction , was accepted with significant findings. -
CAS LX 522 Syntax I the Y Model
CAS LX 522 The Y model • We’re now ready to tackle the most abstract branch of Syntax I the Y-model, the mapping from SS to LF. Here is where we have “movement that you can’t see”. θ Theory Week 10. LF Overt movement, DS Subcategorization Expletive insertion X-bar theory Case theory, EPP SS Covert movement Phonology/ Morphology PF LF Binding theory Derivations Derivations • We think of what we’re doing when we • The steps are not necessarily a reflection of what construct abstract structures of sentences we are doing online as we speak—what we are this way as being a sequence of steps. doing is characterizing our knowledge of language, and it turns out that we can predict our – We start with DS intuitions about what sentences are good and bad – We do some movements and what different sentences mean by – We arrive at SS characterizing the relationship between underlying – We do some more movements thematic relations, surface form, and interpretation in terms of movements in an order with constraints – We arrive at LF on what movements are possible. Derivations Derivations • It seems that the simplest explanation for the • Concerning SS, under this view, languages pick a complex facts of grammar is in terms of several point to focus on between DS and LF and small modifications to the DS that each are subject pronounce that structure. This is (the basis for) SS. to certain constraints, sometimes even things which • There are also certain restrictions on the form SS seem to indicate that one operation has to occur has (e.g., Case, EPP have to be satisfied). -
Minimal Pronouns, Logophoricity and Long-Distance Reflexivisation in Avar
Minimal pronouns, logophoricity and long-distance reflexivisation in Avar* Pavel Rudnev Revised version; 28th January 2015 Abstract This paper discusses two morphologically related anaphoric pronouns inAvar (Avar-Andic, Nakh-Daghestanian) and proposes that one of them should be treated as a minimal pronoun that receives its interpretation from a λ-operator situated on a phasal head whereas the other is a logophoric pro- noun denoting the author of the reported event. Keywords: reflexivity, logophoricity, binding, syntax, semantics, Avar 1 Introduction This paper has two aims. One is to make a descriptive contribution to the crosslin- guistic study of long-distance anaphoric dependencies by presenting an overview of the properties of two kinds of reflexive pronoun in Avar, a Nakh-Daghestanian language spoken natively by about 700,000 people mostly living in the North East Caucasian republic of Daghestan in the Russian Federation. The other goal is to highlight the relevance of the newly introduced data from an understudied lan- guage to the theoretical debate on the nature of reflexivity, long-distance anaphora and logophoricity. The issue at the heart of this paper is the unusual character of theanaphoric system in Avar, which is tripartite. (1) is intended as just a preview with more *The present material was presented at the Utrecht workshop The World of Reflexives in August 2011. I am grateful to the workshop’s audience and participants for their questions and comments. I am indebted to Eric Reuland and an anonymous reviewer for providing valuable feedback on the first draft, as well as to Yakov Testelets for numerous discussions of anaphora-related issues inAvar spanning several years. -
Relative Clause Attachment and Anaphora: a Case for Short Binding
Relative Clause Attachment and Anaphora: A Case for Short Binding Rodolfo Delmonte Ca' Garzoni-Moro, San Marco 3417, Università "Ca Foscari", 30124 - VENEZIA E-mail: [email protected] Abstract Relative clause attachment may be triggered by binding requirements imposed by a short anaphor contained within the relative clause itself: in case more than one possible attachment site is available in the previous structure, and the relative clause itself is extraposed, a conflict may arise as to the appropriate s/c-structure which is licenced by grammatical constraints but fails when the binding module tries to satisfy the short anaphora local search for a bindee. 1 Introduction It is usually the case that anaphoric and pronominal binding take place after the structure building phase has been successfully completed. In this sense, c-structure and f-structure in the LFG framework - or s-structure in the chomskian one - are a prerequisite for the carrying out of binding processes. In addition, they only interact in a feeding relation since binding would not be possibly activated without a complete structure to search, and there is no possible reversal of interaction, from Binding back into s/c-structure level seen that they belong to two separate Modules of the Grammar. As such they contribute to each separate level of representation with separate rules, principles and constraints which need to be satisfied within each Module in order for the structure to be licensed for the following one. However we show that anaphoric binding requirements may cause the parser to fail because the structure is inadequate. We propose a solution to this conflict by anticipating, for anaphors only the though, the agreement matching operations between binder and bindee and leaving the coindexation to the following module. -
8. Binding Theory
THE COMPLICATED AND MURKY WORLD OF BINDING THEORY We’re about to get sucked into a black hole … 11-13 March Ling 216 ~ Winter 2019 ~ C. Ussery 2 OUR ROADMAP •Overview of Basic Binding Theory •Binding and Infinitives •Some cross-linguistic comparisons: Icelandic, Ewe, and Logophors •Picture NPs •Binding and Movement: The Nixon Sentences 3 SOME TERMINOLOGY • R-expression: A DP that gets its meaning by referring to an entity in the world. • Anaphor: A DP that obligatorily gets its meaning from another DP in the sentence. 1. Heidi bopped herself on the head with a zucchini. [Carnie 2013: Ch. 5, EX 3] • Reflexives: Myself, Yourself, Herself, Himself, Itself, Ourselves, Yourselves, Themselves • Reciprocals: Each Other, One Another • Pronoun: A DP that may get its meaning from another DP in the sentence or contextually, from the discourse. 2. Art said that he played basketball. [EX5] • “He” could be Art or someone else. • I/Me, You/You, She/Her, He/Him, It/It, We/Us, You/You, They/Them • Nominative/Accusative Pronoun Pairs in English • Antecedent: A DP that gives its meaning to another DP. • This is familiar from control; PRO needs an antecedent. Ling 216 ~ Winter 2019 ~ C. Ussery 4 OBSERVATION 1: NO NOMINATIVE FORMS OF ANAPHORS • This makes sense, since anaphors cannot be subjects of finite clauses. 1. * Sheselfi / Herselfi bopped Heidii on the head with a zucchini. • Anaphors can be the subjects of ECM clauses. 2. Heidi believes herself to be an excellent cook, even though she always bops herself on the head with zucchini. SOME DESCRIPTIVE OBSERVATIONS Ling 216 ~ Winter 2019 ~ C. -
Japanese Zero Reference Resolution Considering Exophora and Author/Reader Mentions
Japanese Zero Reference Resolution Considering Exophora and Author/Reader Mentions Masatsugu Hangyo Daisuke Kawahara Sadao Kurohashi Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University Yoshida-honmachi, Sakyo-ku Kyoto, 606-8501, Japan hangyo,dk,kuro @nlp.ist.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp { } Abstract For example, in example (1) , the accusative argu- ment of the predicate “食べます” (eat) is omitted .1 In Japanese, zero references often occur and The omitted argument is called a zero pronoun. In many of them are categorized into zero ex- this example, the zero pronoun refers to “パスタ” ophora, in which a referent is not mentioned in (pasta). the document. However, previous studies have focused on only zero endophora, in which Zero reference resolution is divided into two sub- a referent explicitly appears. We present a tasks: zero pronoun detection and referent identifi- zero reference resolution model considering cation. Zero pronoun detection is the task that de- zero exophora and author/reader of a docu- tects omitted zero pronouns from a document. In ment. To deal with zero exophora, our model example (1), this task detects that there are the zero adds pseudo entities corresponding to zero pronouns in the accusative and nominative cases of exophora to candidate referents of zero pro- “食べます” (eat) and there is no zero pronoun in nouns. In addition, we automatically detect the dative case of “食べます”. Referent identifica- mentions that refer to the author and reader of a document by using lexico-syntactic patterns. tion is the task that identifies the referent of a zero We represent their particular behavior in a dis- pronoun. -
The English Referential System (A Tutorial) ! Natural Language Discourse Could Have Looked Like This: ! Andy Kehler Is Traveling to Stanford on Wednesday
Discourse The English Referential System (a tutorial) ! Natural language discourse could have looked like this: ! Andy Kehler is traveling to Stanford on Wednesday. Andy Kehler will give a talk at Stanford. Andy Kehler’s talk at Stanford will be a tutorial on reference. Andy Kehler’s tutorial on reference will be at 4:30. Andy Kehler will give another talk on Thursday. Andy Kehler’s other talk on Thursday will be about pronoun Andrew Kehler interpretation. UCSD Linguistics Workshop On Context Dependence In Language And Communication, Stanford University, November 2, 2011. 1 2 Discourse Language gives us choices ! But instead it looks like this: ! Choices when expressing propositions ! ! Andy Kehler is traveling to Stanford on Wednesday. He will give a Active: Obama won the election tutorial on reference, which will be at 4:30. That talk will be ! Passive: The election was won by Obama followed by another on Thursday about pronoun interpretation. ! Clefts: It was Obama who won the election. ! Topicalization: The election, Obama won. ! Inversion: Winning the election was Obama. ! VP-Preposing: [Obama predicted he would win the election, and] - Win the election he did! 3 4 And more choices Outline ! Choices when referring to things ! Pinning down a few basics ! indefinite ‘a’: Congress passed a bill today. ! ! indefinite ‘this’: Congress passed this bill today. Taking inventory ! definite ‘the’: Congress passed the bill today. ! A few phenomena that I find interesting ! familiar ‘that’: Congress passed that bill today. ! Concluding thoughts ! demonstratives: Congress passed this/that? ! pronouns: Congress passed it! ! proper names: Congress passed House Bill 2356 today. 5 6 Outline Pinning down some terminology (Jespersen 1954) ! Pinning down a few basics If the baby does not thrive on raw milk, boil it. -
Dissertations, Department of Linguistics
UC Berkeley Dissertations, Department of Linguistics Title Reflexivization: A Study in Universal Syntax Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3sv079tk Author Faltz, Leonard M Publication Date 1977 eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California INFORMATION TO USERS This material was produced from a microfilm copy of the original document. While the most advanced technological means to photograph end reproduce this document have been used, the quality is heavily dependent upon the quality of the original submitted. The following explanation of techniques is provided to help you understand markings or patterns which may appear on this reproduction. 1. The sign or "target" for pages apparently lacking from the document photographed is "Missing Page(s)". If it was possible to obtain the missing page(s) or section, they are spliced into the film along with adjacent pages. This may have necessitated cutting thru an image and duplicating adjacent pages to insure you complete continuity. 2. When an image on the film is obliterated with a large round black mark, it is an indication that the photographer suspected that the copy may have moved during exposure and thus cause a blurred image. You will finda good image of the page in the adjacent frame. 3. When a map, drawing or chart, etc., was part of the material being photographed the photographer followed a definite method in "sectioning" the material. It is customary to begin photoing at the upper left hand corner of a large sheet and to continue photoing from left to right in equal sections with a small overlap.