31.3352, Books: Nominal anchoring: Balogh, Latrouite, Van Valin (eds.)

Tue Nov 3 03:03:40 UTC 2020

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-3352. Mon Nov 02 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.3352, Books: Nominal anchoring: Balogh, Latrouite, Van Valin (eds.)

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Date: Mon, 02 Nov 2020 22:03:19
From: Sebastian Nordhoff [Sebastian.Nordhoff at langsci-press.org]
Subject: Nominal anchoring: Balogh, Latrouite, Van Valin (eds.)

Title: Nominal anchoring 
Subtitle: Specificity, definiteness and article systems across languages 
Series Title: Topics at the Grammar-Discourse Interface  

Publication Year: 2020 
Publisher: Language Science Press
	   http://langsci-press.org

Book URL: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/283 

Editor: Kata Balogh
Editor: Anja Latrouite
Editor: Robert D. Van Valin

Electronic: ISBN:  9783961102846 Pages: 211 Price: Europe EURO 0 Comment: Open Access

Abstract:

The papers in this volume address to different degrees issues on the
relationship of articles systems and the pragmatic notions of definiteness and
specificity in typologically diverse languages: Vietnamese, Siwi (Berber),
Russian, Mopan (Mayan), Persian, Danish and Swedish. The main questions that
motivate this volume are:

1. How do languages with and without an article system go about helping the
hearer to recognize whether a given noun phrase should be interpreted as
definite, specific or non-specific?

2. Is there clear-cut semantic definiteness without articles or do we find
systematic ambiguity regarding the interpretation of bare noun phrases?

3. If there is ambiguity, can we still posit one reading as the default?
What exactly do articles in languages encode that are not analyzed as
straightforwardly coding (in)definiteness?

4. Do we find linguistic tools in these languages that are similar to those
found in languages without articles?

Most contributions report on research on different corpora and elicited data
or present the outcome of various experimental studies. One paper presents a
diachronic study of the emergence of article systems. On the issue of how
languages with and without articles guide the hearer to the conclusion that a
given noun phrase should be interpreted as definite, specific or non-specific,
the studies in this paper argue for similar strategies. The languages
investigated in this volume use constructions and linguistic tools that
receive a final interpretation based on discourse prominence considerations
and various aspects of the syntax-semantics interface. In case of ambiguity
between these readings, the default interpretation is given by factors (e. g.,
familiarity, uniqueness) that are known to contribute to the salience of
phrases, but may be overridden by discourse prominence. Articles that do not
straightforwardly mark (in)definiteness encode different kinds of specificity.
In the languages studied in this volume, whether they have articles or do not
have an article system, we find similar factors and linguistic tools in the
calculation process of interpretations. The volume contains revised selected
papers from the workshop entitled Specificity, definiteness and article
systems across languages held at the 40th Annual Conference of the German
Linguistic Society (DGfS), 7-9 March, 2018 at the University of Stuttgart.

Linguistic Field(s): Pragmatics
                     Semantics
                     Typology

Written In: English  (eng)

See this book announcement on our website: 
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=148153

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