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Full-Text Articles in Semantics and Pragmatics
'You' Will Always Have 'Me': A Compositional Theory Of Person, Kaden T. Holladay
'You' Will Always Have 'Me': A Compositional Theory Of Person, Kaden T. Holladay
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation investigates the morpho-syntactic makeup of personful expressions
in natural language; special focus is given to referential uses of personal pronouns. The central thesis guiding the inquiry is that utterance contexts, which serve to fix the semantic values of person indexicals, are specifically a kind of centered situation. This treatment of contexts puts restrictions on what kinds of person features are definable, and the resulting inventory of such features (in conjunction with independently-motivated pragmatic constraints on the use of referential expressions) provides a novel explanation for the typology of person systems.
Between Verb And Preposition: Diachronic Stages Of Coverbs In Mandarin Chinese, Glynis Jones
Between Verb And Preposition: Diachronic Stages Of Coverbs In Mandarin Chinese, Glynis Jones
Masters Theses
Mandarin Chinese has long been known to possess a category of words known as ‘coverbs’ in the literature, which sit in the gray area between verb and preposition. Li and Thompson (1974) describe the historical origins of Mandarin coverbs to be full transitive verbs, despite their modern state being decidedly less verbal. They also note that coverbs are a non-homogenous class. This thesis works to establish categories of coverbs in Mandarin Chinese and their distance from true verbhood in order to understand the diachronic shift that coverbs are currently undergoing before our very eyes. I will draw on the work …