Indefinite Pronouns

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  The Life of Language

  Papers in Linguistics in Honor of William Bright

  • Jane H. Hill, P. J. Mistry, Lyle Campbell, Jane H. Hill, P. J. Mistry, Lyle Campbell(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Indefinite Pronouns in Kannada D. N. S. Bhat 1. Introduction Indefinite Pronouns occur in the form of a paradigm (or set of paradigms) in most of the world's languages. They are similar in their structure to demonstra-tives, relatives, and interrogatives. Even though called pronouns, these para-digms include not only pro-nouns, but also pro-adjectives, pro-adverbs, and even pro-verbs. They include representations of the major constituents of conceptual structure (Jackendoff 1983: 48) such as person, thing, property, place, time, man-ner, amount, reason, and event (see Haspelmath 1993: 31). Languages differ, however, in the exact set of distinctions that are shown by these paradigms. As has been pointed out by Haspelmath (1993: 9), the use of the term indefi-nite pronoun differs from that of other comparable terms like demonstrative pronoun, relative pronoun, and interrogative pronoun in most of the tradi-tional descriptive grammars in that the former includes, in addition to this cohe-sive set of forms, certain additional ones, such as quantifiers like few, many, several, and all, identity pronouns like other and same, and generic nouns like one. As a result, the category indefinite pronoun looks like a wastebasket cate-gory. However, these latter forms do not show several of the characteristics that are shown by the former (i.e., forms which come under the cohesive set or paradigm), and hence we may regard such forms as only marginal in nature, and restrict our study to the cohesive set of Indefinite Pronouns. There are two main types of structures that have been reported to occur as in-definite pronouns in various languages. In the case of most languages, Indefinite Pronouns are reported to be either identical with interrogative pronouns or de-rived from them through the addition of certain affixes or particles, whereas in others, they are generally derived from generic nouns through the addition of an indefinite marker or article.

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  Some Systems of Substitution Correlations in Modern American English

  • Ruth Crymes(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  For example, one meaning ol the personal pronouns has to do with the speaker-hearer relationship; one meaning of the demonstratives has to do with pointing. Yet the personal pronoun also points, and the demonstrative also has to do with the speaker-hearer relationship. Indefinites are called so because of something they sug-gest either about their real-world referents or about their antecedents, if they have any; yet some words classed as interrogatives are as indefinite as those classed as indefinites. And so on. Among the traditional treatments of the pronoun — counting as traditional those which admit to the class the heterogeneous array just alluded to and which make use of semantic criteria — that of Ralph B. Long is one of the more formally based. 7 Although he gives semantic subclassifications of the pronouns and generalizes these 4 For suggestions for criteria to use in defining the set of personal pronouns in English as a subclass of nouns see Fred W. Householder, Jr., Review of Paul Forchheimer, The Category of Person in Language, in Language, XXXI (1955), 95. 4 Otto Jespersen, A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, 7 vols. (Copenhagen, Einar Munksgaard, 1909-1949), II, 12. • See ibid., II and VII; Henry Sweet, A New English Grammar, Logical and Historical, 2 vols. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, Impressions of 1955 and 1958, first published 1891 and 1898), I, 69-86, II, 7-11, 71-81; E. Kruisinga, A Handbook of Present-Day English, 5th ed., 3 vols. (Groningen, P. NoordhofF, 1932), Part II s ; and Hendrik Poutsma, A Grammar of Late Modern English, 5 vols. (Groningen, P. Noordhoff, 1904-1926), Part II, Section IB. 7 Ralph B. Long, The Sentence and Its Parts: A Grammar of Contemporary English (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 45-50.

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  Semantics - Noun Phrases and Verb Phrases

  • Paul Portner, Klaus Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn, Paul Portner, Klaus Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  2 Daniel Büring indexical: you, now, here ) or non-deictic ( she, then, there ). Among the definite non-demonstratives (indexical or not), English furthermore distinguishes reflex-ive pronouns ( herself, ourselves ), non-reflexive pronouns ( she, her, our ), and reciprocals ( each other, one another ). In what follows we will concentrate on personal pronouns, which have received by far the most attention in the literature; many aspects of the semantics of temporal and locative pronouns will be analogous, but their details will hinge to a large extent on the chosen ontology for temporal and locative expressions in general, which this article will be agnostic about. In this section we will in turn discuss the three major classes indefinite, definite, and demonstrative pronouns; discussion of reciprocals will be found in section 4.3. Section 2 then details the semantics of definite pronouns, followed by a treatment of pronoun binding in section 3. Section 4 is concerned with the semantic content of pronouns (some-times called ‘phi-features’), followed by a short discussion of (the semantic aspects of) binding theory in section 5. 1.1 Indefinite Pronouns Indefinite Pronouns come in several series like the English some-, no-and any -series, with each series having exponents for the major ontological categories, such as English -one/body, -thing, -where, -how etc. (Haspelmath 1997, especially chapter 3). We won’t discuss the peculiarities of the any -series here (see article 3 [Semantics: Sentence and Information Structure] (Giannakidou) Polarity items ); the some-and no -series seem to have the same denotation as the parallel quanti-fied DPs like some person, no thing etc. In a generalized quantifier framework, see for example article 4 [this volume] (Keenan) Quantifiers , their interpretation would be along the lines of (1a), and their translation into second-order logic like in (1b): (1) a.

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  Grammaticalization at Work

  Studies of Long-term Developments in English

  • Matti Rissanen, Merja Kytö, Kirsi Heikkonen, Matti Rissanen, Merja Kytö, Kirsi Heikkonen(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Indefinite Pronouns with singular human reference Helena Raumolin-Brunberg and Leena Kahlas-Tarkka 1. Introduction 1 The object of this investigation is a subgroup of pronouns, i.e. items that in traditional terms are called Indefinite Pronouns with singular human reference, e.g. SOMEONE, ANYBODY, EVERYONE and NOBODY. The traditional characterization is not necessarily accurate, since there are seri-ous doubts about the indefiniteness of some of the items (for further dis-cussion, see 2.2 below). Nevertheless, since it is difficult to invent a more pertinent name for this subcategory of pronouns, we will use the well-established term 'Indefinite Pronouns'. The basic data for this study were retrieved from the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (see Kytö 1996; Rissanen et al. 1993), supplemented by other texts, e.g. the Toronto (Healey—Venezky 1980), Shakespeare (Wells —Taylor [eds.] 1989), and Century corpora (Milic 1990) and a Present-day English Bible translation {Revised English Bible, REB, 1989). The full inventory of the pronouns discussed is presented in Table 1. The repertoire and its subdivision follow Quirk et al.'s discussion of Indefinite Pronouns (1985: 376-392). As time wears on, the four paradigms, assertive 'some-one', nonassertive 'anyone', universal 'everyone' and negative 'no one' become more or less symmetrical, all of them having compound variants (ending in MAN, ONE or BODY) and simple items, which in later times became similar to the corresponding determiners, except for NONE (deter-miner NO). The simple pronouns are called OF-pronouns by Quirk et al. (1985: 379), since in Present-day English they occur in partitive phrases. Semantically they are quantifiers, although this study does not adhere to the logic-based formal tradition from which this term has been derived. 18 Helena Raumolin-Brunberg and Leena Kahlas-Tarkka Table 1.

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  Easy Learning Spanish Grammar

  • Collins Dictionaries(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Collins

    (Publisher)

  Pronouns What is a pronoun? A pronoun is a word you use instead of a noun, when you do not need or want to name someone or something directly, for example, it , you , none . ➤ There are several different types of pronoun: ● Personal pronouns such as I, you, he, her and they, which are used to refer to you, the person you are talking to, or other people and things. They can be either subject pronouns ( I, you, he and so on) or object pronouns ( him, her, them, and so on). ● Possessive pronouns like mine and yours, which show who someone or something belongs to. ● Indefinite Pronouns like someone or nothing, which refer to people or things in a general way without saying exactly who or what they are. ● Relative pronouns like who , which or that, which link two parts of a sentence together. ● Interrogative pronouns like who , what or which, which are used in questions. ● Demonstrative pronouns like this or those, which point things or people out. ● Reflexive pronouns, a type of object pronoun that forms part of Spanish reflexive verbs like lavarse (meaning to wash ) or llamarse (meaning to be called ). ➪ For more information on Reflexive verbs , see page 91. ➤ Pronouns often stand in for a noun to save repeating it. I finished my homework and gave it to my teacher. Do you remember Jack? I saw him at the weekend. ➤ Word order with personal pronouns is usually different in Spanish and English.

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  42 Pronouns Personal pronouns: subject What is a subject pronoun? A subject pronoun is a word such as I, he, she and they , that carries out the action expressed by the verb. Pronouns stand in for nouns when it is clear who or what is being talked about, for example, My brother isn’t here at the moment. He’ll be back in an hour.

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  Constituent Syntax: Quantification, Numerals, Possession, Anaphora

  • Philip Baldi, Pierluigi Cuzzolin, Philip Baldi, Pierluigi Cuzzolin(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Latin Indefinite Pronouns are marked 1. Another classic distinction is that between quantifiers and determiners; that is, between a quantificational and a cardinal reading. On this subject, see Lyons (1977, 2: 454–460), Diesing (1992), Milsark (1977), Reuland and ter Meulen (1987). 20 Alessandra Bertocchi, Mirka Maraldi, and Anna Orlandini Table 1. Indefinite formation by prefix or suffix Prefix Suffix person aliquis quisquam thing aliquid quidquam, quicquam place aliquo, alicubi quoquam, usquam time aliquando umquam by different kinds of indefiniteness markers and are thus derived forms, as in most languages. 1.1 The derivation of indefinites In the world’s languages there are two main types of derivational bases: (i) generic ontological category nouns such as person , thing , place , etc., and (ii) interrogative pronouns. As Haspelmath (1997) suggests, usually all the mem-bers of an indefinite series are derived from the same kind of base. English is somewhat peculiar in that it has both interrogative-based and generic-noun-based Indefinite Pronouns, even within the same series: somebody , something , and someplace (based on generic nouns) exist alongside somewhere, some-how , and somewhat (based on interrogative pronouns). The majority of the world’s languages have interrogative-based Indefinite Pronouns. In several western Indo-European languages, which normally use interrogative-derived indefinites, bare interrogatives used as indefinites are also found. This is the case for Vedic Sanskrit, German, Gothic, Lithuanian, and most of the Slavic languages. The type of derivation based on pronominal origin, at least for these languages, has been the object of different proposals concerning the di-rection of the derivation, whether from interrogative to Indefinite Pronouns or the other way round. Latin is a language where indefinites have a pronomi-nal origin; on the original value there is no general agreement.

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  Typology and Second Language Acquisition

  • Anna Giacalone Ramat(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Italian, as the case in point, has three se-ries of Indefinite Pronouns, listed in (3), the number of series com-prised in Haspelmath's 40 languages sample ranging from two - as e.g. in Ancash Quechua - to seven - as in Russian (cf. pp. 68-75). (3) a. qualcuno 'somebody', qualcosa 'something', qualche 'some'. b. nessuno 'nobody', niente 'nothing', mai 'never', nessuno 'no'. c. chiunque 'whoever', dovunque 'wherever', comunque 'how-ever', qualsiasi 'any'. 88 Giuliano Bernini Individual Indefinite Pronouns may combine the expression of in-definiteness and of one of a series of ontological categories such as person, thing, time, place, manner. These two components may be coded in a transparent way, as in Italian qual[c+cosa 'IN-DEF+thing', or fused in the indefinite pronoun, as in the case of Italian mai 'NEG.INDEF.time'. 6 Indefinite Pronouns are used across languages for nine functions, which are shown to be organised on the basis of implicational rela-tionships and which may be represented as in the implicational map η reported here as figure 1 and drawn from Haspelmath (1997: 64). 4 question 6 indirect negation 7 / direct negation 1 2 3 specific specific irrealis known unknown non-specific 5 8 conditional comparative protasis 9 free choice Figure 1. The two-dimensional implicational map for indefinite pronoun functions (Haspelmath 1997: 64) The implicational map defines the semantic space which Indefinite Pronouns appear to cover across languages and at the same time con-strains the possible range of polysemy of Indefinite Pronouns in indi-vidual languages (Haspelmath 1997: 62). Three major regularities Indefinite Pronouns in non-native Italian 89 characterise the distribution of Indefinite Pronouns among the nine functions of the implicational map and the lexicalisation patterns of Indefinite Pronouns inventories. As to the functional distribution, in-definite pronouns must cover adjacent functions as reported on the map.

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  Signed Language Interpretation and Translation Research

  Selected Papers from the First International Symposium

  • Brenda Nicodemus, Keith Cagle, Brenda Nicodemus, Keith Cagle(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Gallaudet University Press

    (Publisher)

  he, she ), but the majority of English pronouns are underspecified (or not specified) for this linguistic feature. Likewise, first-person and third-person forms demonstrate number information (singular vs. plural), but that is not true for the second-person forms (this is also true for possessives, which are not discussed here).

  Of course, both language users and interpreters face linguistic ambiguity and morphological underspecification daily, which may be a challenge for full comprehension of a speaker’s intended message. For interpreters, without such comprehension, interpretation into the target language could be compromised. The challenges posed by underspecification vary depending on the features of the languages used by the interpreters; for example, the “maleness” feature of the English pronoun he (third-person singular) does not appear in the deictic pronominal form (pointing to a third person locus) in American Sign Language (ASL). If an interpreter were producing an interpretation from English to ASL for the pronoun he , the interpreter may need to specify that the third-person deictic point refers to a male (e.g., by using an appropriate sign for context, such as MAN , BOY , UNCLE ). Conversely, if the interpreter was rendering an English interpretation of an ASL deictic point that references a third-person agent who had previously not been introduced in the discourse, the interpreter is faced with the challenge of selecting the English pronoun he or she . In this case, the interpreter may also opt for using they as a strategy for avoiding having to commit to he or she

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  Definiteness and Indefiniteness

  A Study in Reference and Grammaticality Prediction

  • John Hawkins, John A. Hawkins(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  To claim (a) is to claim that there do exist other solutions which are all capable of solving the problem, any one of which could be used. But (b) claims only that there may or may not be other solutions, and is, therefore, non-committal about the existence of other such objects. The data which we have considered using indefinites can be said to require that there are other possible referents in the sense of (a), and not in the sense of (b).

  Explaining the Logical Contrast between Definiteness and Indefiniteness

  We see now that indefinite descriptions do not contrast pragmatically with definite descriptions in the sense that indefinite referents are not locatable in speaker-hearer shared sets. Instead, the contrast is of a more logical kind: exclusiveness, or reference to not-all, versus inclusiveness, or reference to all. Why should the contrast be this way?

  We have argued that referring predicates have a potential for infinite reference. This potential can be fully realised by using a universal quantifier, all or every. The effect of using a definite article was, we argued, to impose a pragmatic blanket on the potentially infinite number of referents of a referring expression by instructing the hearer to exploit shared knowledge and the shared situation in reducing this infinity to something finite. All the potential referents falling outside this blanket are excluded as irrelevant, and the definite article refers inclusively to all the relevant objects falling under it.

  But the indefinite articles are neutral to these pragmatic pre-suppositions of the. It is, therefore, no part of their actual meaning that the domain of reference relative to which the hearer can interpret the indefinite description is being pragmatically restricted, even though indefinite referents may, context permitting, be optionally located in a shared set on some occasions. But as a result of this indifference to the pragmatic parameters of definite reference, it becomes an important part of the meaning of specific indefinites that reference is being made only to a proper subset of the infinite number of potential referents of the referring expression. If it is not a part of their actual meaning that the hearer is to locate the referent (s) in a pragmatically restricted domain of reference, then there is no way of restricting the infinite number of potential referents which could qualify for the reference from the hearer’s point of view. Hence, short of referring to all the infinite referents of the referring expression, the exclusion of at least some referents with specific indefinites becomes inevitable. But the pragmatic delimitation of the reference which is a part of the meaning of the definite article means that the number of objects qualifying for the definite reference can be much less than the infinity allowed for by the referring predicate. And whereas with the students the existence of students falling outside the pragmatic blanket is irrelevant to the reference, the very indifference of some students to a pragmatic blanket means that the exclusion of potential referents becomes a permanent part of the meaning of indefiniteness. And even when some students

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  Studies in Middle English Linguistics

  • Jacek Fisiak(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Whatever happened to the Middle English Indefinite Pronouns? Matti Rissanen 1. Introductory In his lecture at the Seventh International Conference on English Histori-cal Linguistics Jacek Fisiak exhaustively discussed the question of the essence and definition of the period called Middle English (Fernandez et al. 1994: 47—61). Without any doubt, Middle English marks a period in the development of English in which thoroughgoing changes took place in the basic structure of the language. These changes were so pro-found as to justify the claim that the typological character of the lan-guage was different at the end of the Middle English period from what it had been at its beginning. There are a number of details in the development of the grammatical sys-tem of English which reflect these more general trends of structural change and can be linked with them. One of these is the development of the referen-tial/quantifying indefinites which could be called the some/any paradigm. From the diachronic point of view, these pronouns form a set, in contrast to the multal and paucal {many, few) or universal (all, every, each ) quantifiers. 1 The set contains both assertive and non-assertive members. The changes within this set, or variant field (cf. Kytö-Rissanen 1983: 470), or syntactic paradigm (cf. Ryden-Brorström 1987: 10), can easily be linked with more general trends in the typological development occur-ring in the Middle English period. I shall concentrate on the pronominal, or non-determiner, use of the variants of the some/any paradigm, mainly because this use most clearly displays the early richness of the forms and the later organization and regularization of the system. 2. Old English background In Old English there are more than a dozen pronominal forms belonging to the 'some/any' paradigm (Rissanen 1987: 411).

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