Re: Bowtudgelean

Den 28. apr. 2008 kl. 12.52 skreiv David J. Peterson:

> Gundel et al.* identified a maximum of six possible states of
> definiteness
> (what they call "givenness"), and all languages encode them (but
> not all the same way, and not all explicitly, of course).  So while
> English has simply "a" and "the", it actually has various strategies
> to produce each of the six points on the givenness hierarchy (as
> do all other languages).  For more info, there was a discussion on
> Conlang a few years back:
>
> <http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?
> A2=ind0505A&L=CONLANG&P=R169>
Interesting, but the theory indeed doesn't give me the impression of
flawlessness. I'd like to read that response from your pragmatics
professor. Is it available some place?

In Urianian I tried, just to amuse myself, to build nominal forms
from nouns + attached demonstratives like in Scandinavian. The
existence of these is not implausible, since they are neighbouring
languages, and since the result was pleasing (at least to me), I
thought of using them as definites, but could not get them to work
that way. The only use I have found for them so far is as emphatic
forms in poetry (useful for adjusting the syllable count), or for
special emphasis in speech. But perhaps they deserve some place in
the givenness hierarchy...

LEF

Reply