Table Of ContentSpecial Indefinites in Sentence and Discourse
Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik
herausgegeben von Gunter Narr
574
Sofiana Lindemann
Special Indefinites in Sentence and
Discourse
2., überarbeitete und ergänzte Auflage
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Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................7
1 Introduction ..............................................................9
1.1 I ntroducing the phenomena ...................................... 12
1.2 G oals of the book and proposed analysis ......................... 16
1.3 L imitations of the investigation ................................... 18
1.4 O utline of the book ............................................... 19
2 Past work on reference ................................................. 23
2.1 S emantic-pragmatic accounts on (in)definiteness ................. 25
2.2 A ccessibility as activation ......................................... 31
2.2.1 T he Accessibility Hierarchy ................................. 32
2.3 A ccessibility as topicality ........................................ 34
2.3.1 G ivón’s distance model ...................................... 35
2.3.2 C entering Theory ........................................... 36
2.3.3 T he accessibility of referents ................................ 42
2.4 A ccessibility as expectancy ....................................... 51
2.4.1 T he discourse structuring potential ......................... 55
2.4.2 T he discourse analysis method .............................. 58
2.5 S ummary ......................................................... 65
3 English indefinite this ................................................... 67
3.1 F orms and uses of demonstratives ................................ 69
3.1.1 D efinite uses of demonstrative this .......................... 70
3.1.2 T he indefinite use of demonstrative this ..................... 73
3.2 P roperties of indefinite this ....................................... 76
3.2.1 R eferential properties of indefinite this ...................... 76
3.2.2 D iscourse-pragmatic properties of indefinite this ............ 81
3.3 T he discourse effects of indefinite this ............................ 87
3.3.1 T he experimental setup ...................................... 89
3.3.2 P rocedure and data analysis ................................. 92
3.3.3 R esults and discussions ...................................... 92
3.4 D emonstratives and focus of attention .......................... 101
3.5 S ummary ........................................................ 107
6 Table of Contents
4 German indefinite so’n ................................................. 109
4.1 Demonstrative uses of so’n ....................................... 110
4.1.1 Deictic and anaphoric uses of so ............................ 113
4.1.2 Out-of-the-blue uses of so’n 114
4.1.3 So’n as a marker of referential structure .................... 118
4.1.4 Summary ................................................... 121
4.2 R eferential properties of indefinite so’n .......................... 121
4.2.1 Different types of readings of indefinite so’n ................ 122
4.2.2 Referential readings of indefinite so’n ....................... 127
4.3 D iscourse properties of indefinite so’n ........................... 133
4.3.1 Indefinite so’n and immediacy of reference ................. 133
4.3.2 The DSP of indefinite so’n .................................. 136
4.4 S ummary ........................................................ 146
5 Pe-marking of indefinite noun phrases in Romanian ...................... 149
5.1 Criteria for differential object marking in Romanian ............. 151
5.2 The distribution of pe-marking with definite expressions ........ 157
5.2.1 DOM with definite modified noun phrases .................. 157
5.2.2 DOM with definite unmodified noun phrases ............... 159
5.3 P e-marking with indefinite noun phrases ........................ 165
5.3.1 Specificity .................................................. 165
5.3.2 Topicality and pe-marking with indefinite NPs ............. 175
5.3.3 Summary ................................................... 178
5.4 T he DSP of pe-marking in Romanian ............................ 179
5.4.1 Experimental investigation on pe-marking .................. 180
5.5 S ummary ........................................................ 192
6 Referential properties and discourse structuring ........................ 195
6.1 Referential properties ............................................ 197
6.2 The discourse structuring potential ............................. 199
6.3 Referential properties and discourse structuring ................ 206
6.3.1 Grammaticalization of the indefinite article ................ 211
6.3.2 DOM in Romanian as an indicator of DSP .................. 213
6.3.3 The proximal demonstrative and DSP ...................... 215
6.4 S ummary ........................................................ 217
7 Conclusion ............................................................ 219
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................ 229
List of figures ............................................................. 245
List of tables .............................................................. 247
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Klaus von Heusinger, who fostered my decision to become
a linguist throughout the years of my studies at the University of Stuttgart. I am
grateful for the fruitful and inspiring discussions we had.
I am dearly indebted to Elsi Kaiser, who patiently assisted me and provided
insightful advice. During my stay at the Linguistics Department at the Univer-
sity of Southern California, Los Angeles, I was particularly impressed by her
gift to inspire her students (including myself) and increase their appetite and
knowledge in psycholinguistics.
Many thanks to my colleagues and friends at the Department of Linguistics
at the University of Stuttgart, namely Regine Brandtner, Annika Deichsel, Cor-
nelia Ebert, Ljudmila Geist, Dolgor Guntsetseg, Daniel Hole, Elena Karagjosova,
Udo Klein, Elisabeth Löbel, Edgar Onea and Johannes Wespel. I am grateful to
have been given the chance to work in such a friendly, warm and international
environment.
I am thankful for the financial support by a grant of the Romanian Ministry
of Research and Innovation, CNCS-UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-
TE-2016-1241, within PNCDI III.
This work was supported in part by the collaborative research center SFB 732
“Incremental Specification in Context” funded by the German Science Founda-
tion (DFG).
My family and friends provided advice and encouragement at all hours and
in all matters from lesser or greater distance. Thank you for your unconditioned
support.
1 Introduction
This book is about particular types of indefinite noun phrases that give structure
to the discourse in terms of predictive expectations. Indefinite noun phrases
are nominal expressions with a descriptive part and a special determiner form
in those languages that have developed one. Typical examples of English in-
definite noun phrases include, but are not limited to: a man, this man, several
men, a certain man, some men, cardinals, the zero of bare plurals, partitives, and,
according to some analyses, noun phrases headed by the morpheme any (Horn
1999, among others).
In the discussions starting with early work in the philosophical oriented tra-
dition (Frege 1892, Russel 1905) and continuing with more recent, linguistic ori-
ented proposals (Fodor and Sag 1982, Farkas 1994, 2002, Kamp and Bende-Farkas
2006), the question about the properties, uses, and function(s) of indefinite noun
phrases has been answered in several ways. From a semantic point of view, one
of the most basic properties that indefinite noun phrases share is existential
quantification, which can be paraphrased as “there exists” or “there is at least
one”. That means that the predicate within the scope of existential quantifiers
is true for at least one value of the predicate variable. Consider the clause in
(1), which describes a simple transitive event and in which the indefinite noun
phrases a dog and some dog have existential force. This entails that the sentence
is true if at least one entity is a dog and is in the garden.
(1) A dog/ some dog is in the garden.
In addition to asserting existential generalization, indefinite noun phrases dis-
play another characteristic that pertains to structuring the information in a
paragraph, rather than to the truth conditions of a clause. The so-called Novelty
Condition captures the property of indefinite noun phrases to introduce new
and unfamiliar entities in the discourse (Kamp 1981, Heim 1982, among others).
With respect to this property, indefinite noun phrases behave differently com-
pared to other types of referring expressions (e.g. definite noun phrases), which
are used to refer back to entities that have been previously introduced in the
discourse and refer to discourse-old entities.
Besides existential quantification and novelty of reference, the notion of spe-
cificity has played a crucial role in the analysis of indefinite noun phrases as
well (Fillmore 1967, Karttunen 1969, Partee 1970, Kripke 1977, Ludlow and Neale
