Demonstratives Deictic Pointing And The Conceptualization Of Space

This volume is a collection of articles which present the results of investigations into the grammar, semantics and pragmatics of deictic expressions in several languages. Special emphasis is placed on contrastive studies that take cognitive and cultural context into account. Both the empirical and theoretical studies focus on the ways in which spatial, temporal, personal and textual entities are conceptualised and referred to. The cognitive approach proves to be a promising perspective combining aspects of perception, reasoning and linguistic expression to reveal what seems to be at the very heart of deictics.

Linking grammatical analyses with ideas about a shareable reality, this book investigates some fascinating ways in which nominal reference is exploited to meet interpersonal and rhetorical goals. It focuses on the use of demonstrative and possessive determiners in Polish discourse and proposes that the phenomenon of deixis be reexamined in the light of linguistic variation. The book illustrates a growing concern with the application of cognitive grammar to the study of situated language use and its social outcomes. What emerges is a new understanding of the role of deictic elements as tools for establishing intersubjective coordination and expressing attitudes. This book is for anyone actively seeking to understand how linguistic systems reflect human socio-cognitive abilities and in what ways reality is mediated through language.

Demonstratives and Grammaticalization offers an in-depth analysis of the demonstrative system in Turkish. This book provides the first comprehensive analysis dealing with both the synchronic variations in Turkish demonstratives and their grammatical changes. It sheds light on the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the demonstratives, systematically describes the various usages of these forms, and provides a unified explanation for the various accounts of their distribution. While the focus is on Turkish, this analysis contributes to our understanding of how a demonstrative system operates in a language with a three-way distinction.

This monograph explores the tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality of Korean, which has a rich verbal inflectional system, and proposes novel treatments within the framework of compositional semantics. One of the major contributions is the demonstration that Korean has two types of deictic tense—simple deictic and spatial deictic tense. Spatial deictic tense refers to the notion of the speaker’s ‘perceptual field’ (or deictic range), as well as to temporality, functioning to set up a condition for a systematic evidential distinction. The research in this volume shows that the basic paradigm of evidentiality of Korean derives from the standard TMA system combined with the notion of space. This volume also shows that perfect and past tense utilize different primitives. The intended readership of this volume extends beyond Koreanists to scholars interested specifically in tense, mood, aspect, and evidentiality as well as in general theories of grammar and semantics-pragmatics.

This volume explores the semantics and pragmatics of Southern Quechua and Ecuadorian Quichua expressions of stance and deixis. This work is the first to study a broad range of stance/deictic phenomena in Quechua and Quichua in-depth.

All languages have demonstratives, but their form, meaning and use vary tremendously across the languages of the world. This book presents the first large-scale analysis of demonstratives from a cross-linguistic and diachronic perspective. It is based on a representative sample of 85 languages. The first part of the book analyzes demonstratives from a synchronic point of view, examining their morphological structures, semantic features, syntactic functions, and pragmatic uses in spoken and written discourse. The second part concentrates on diachronic issues, in particular on the development of demonstratives into grammatical markers. Across languages demonstratives provide a frequent historical source for definite articles, relative and third person pronouns, nonverbal copulas, sentence connectives, directional preverbs, focus markers, expletives, and many other grammatical markers. The book describes the different mechanisms by which demonstratives grammaticalize and argues that the evolution of grammatical markers from demonstratives is crucially distinct from other cases of grammaticalization.