Re: Ambiguity
| From: | Paul Kershaw <ptkershaw@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, January 5, 2009, 16:02 |
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> On Sun, 4 Jan 2009 21:22:36 -0800, Roger Mills <romiltz@...>
> wrote:
>
>>How do various other conlangs deal with ambiguities like this? Has the
> problem arisen? How much attention is it really worth?
I've been working on a "protagonist pronoun," which refers to a specific person
throughout a narrative. In the narrative, the speaker would provide an
establishing sentence, like "Let me tell you what happened to Jane yesterday."
After that, the referent of the pronoun would be Jane until a different
protagonist is deliberately established.
The pronoun could be coreferential with the speaker, the listener, or some third
party, depending on the context. For instance, I could establish myself as the
protagonist of a story I'm telling you, and you'd use the same pronoun when
discussing the event with me:
-- Paul