Pronouns in Kumyk discourse: a cognitive perspective.

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.