Pronouns in Kumyk discourse: a cognitive perspective.
2009-03
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Pronouns in Kumyk discourse: a cognitive perspective.
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2009-03
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Abstract
This dissertation investigates pronominal forms of referring expressions in
Kumyk, a Turkic language spoken primarily in the Dagestan region of Russia. The
Kumyk language has six third person pronominals, including null arguments,
demonstratives, and reflexives. Morphologically, each of these forms is unmarked for
gender or animacy. This work provides an explanatory account of the distribution and
interpretation of different pronominal forms in Kumyk primarily in terms of what these
forms communicate about the status of their referents in the minds of the speech
participants, specifically claiming that different pronominal forms signal differences in
the cognitive status of their referents, following the Givenness Hierarchy model of
Gundel, Hedberg, and Zacharski (1993). The analysis is based primarily on data from a
corpus of oral and written Kumyk texts with supporting evidence from grammaticality
judgments of constructed examples in questionnaires. According to the analysis, null
arguments and reflexives signal the status, ‘in focus’, while demonstratives signal the
status, ‘activated’. Particular attention is given to the role of scalar implicatures which
arise from the unidirectional entailment of statuses on the Givenness Hierarchy and the
fact that the demonstrative sho, which signals activation, has a particular association with
this implicature. A unique contribution of the analysis is the evidence for the fact that
sho not only gives rise to a scalar implicature in contexts where two referents have
different maximal cognitive status(e.g. one in focus versus one at most activated), but
also in contexts where two referents have the same maximal cognitive status, a fact which
leads to the conclusion that this form specializes in indicating the less salient of two or
more entities. The study also provides evidence that the demonstrative bu specializes in
indicating the more prominent of two or more entities that are at least activated. Finally,
in addition to the role of pronominals in signaling cognitive status and communicating
the relative prominence of multiple referents, the study explores contextual effects such
as imposed salience, point of view, empathy, or contrastive focus that are associated with particular forms.
Description
University of Minnesota Ph.D. March 2009. Major: Linguistics. Advisor: Jeanette Gundel. 1 computer file (PDF); x, 303 pages, appendices 1-4. Ill. (map) col.
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Humnick, Linda Anne. (2009). Pronouns in Kumyk discourse: a cognitive perspective.. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/49206.
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