Results found: 2

Search results

Search:
in the keywords: referential

Sort By:

Limit search:

Contextualism, Pragmatics and Definite Descriptions

100%

Vignolo M.

Lodz Papers in Pragmatics

2011

vol. 7

issue 2

291-307

Very few philosophers and linguists doubt that definite descriptions have attributive uses and referential uses. The point of disagreement concerns whether the difference in uses is grounded on a difference in meaning. The Ambiguity Theory holds while the Implicature Theory denies that definite descriptions are ambiguous expressions, having an attributive meaning and a referential meaning. Contextualists have attempted to steer between the Ambiguity Theory and the Implicature Theory. I claim that the early contextualist account provided by Recanati and Bezuidehnout based on the idea that definite descriptions are semantically underdetermined and in need of a completion from the contextually available information through an optional top-down pragmatic process suffers from an explanatory gap.

Indicating verbs in British Sign Language favour motivated use of space

84%

Cormier K., Fenlon J., Schembri A.

Open Linguistics

2014

vol. 1

issue 1

Sign languages have traditionally been described as having a distinction between (1) arbitrary (referential or syntactic) space, considered to be a purely grammatical use of space in which locations arbitrarily represent concrete or abstract subject and/or object arguments using pronouns or indicating verbs, for example, and (2) motivated (topographic or surrogate) space, involving mapping of locations of concrete referents onto the signing space via classifier constructions. Some linguists have suggested that it may be misleading to see the two uses of space as being completely distinct from one another. In this study, we use conversational data from the British Sign Language Corpus (www.bslcorpusproject.org) to look at the use of space with modified indicating verbs – specifically the directions in which these verbs are used as well as the co-occurrence of eyegaze shifts and constructed action. Our findings suggest that indicating verbs are frequently produced in conditions that use space in a motivated way and are rarely modified using arbitrary space. This contrasts with previous claims that indicating verbs in BSL prototypically use arbitrary space. We discuss the implications of this for theories about grammaticalisation and the role of gesture in sign languages and for sign language teaching.

Refine search results

1 Lodz Papers in Pragmatics

1 Open Linguistics

1 Cormier K.

1 Fenlon J.

1 Schembri A.

1 Vignolo M.

1 2015

1 2011

Search results

Contextualism, Pragmatics and Definite Descriptions

Indicating verbs in British Sign Language favour motivated use of space