Special Indefinites in Discourse

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Klaus von Heusinger
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2013 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 245072332

Indefinite noun phrases (or short indefinites) contribute to different semantic and pragmatic levels: (i) they make an existential contribution to the truth condition of a sentence, (ii) they introduce discourse referents as potential antecedents for subsequent anaphoric terms, and, as the present project aims to show, (iii) they furnish discourse referents with a Discourse Structuring Potential, i.e. they give information about the referential structure of the upcoming discourse, e.g. at what point in the discourse and how the entity associated with the discourse referent is going to be re-mentioned. The goals of this project are twofold. First, we intend to investigate the three aforementioned semantic-pragmatic levels from an empirical and theoretical point of view. Second, we will extend existing semantic theories through an account of the Discourse Structuring Potential, i.e. by a theory that models the forward looking discourse properties of indefinites. Ençs (1991) paper on indefinite direct objects in Turkish is a first step towards a semantics of indefinites that relates specificity to discourse-linking. In the present approach we will take a step further and develop a theory that not only analyses the backward looking discourse properties, but also extends to forward looking discourse properties. This new semantic theory will have as a starting point a thorough investigation of indefinite direct objects in Turkish, which alternate between a case-marked and an unmarked form. The project will expand the data that has been discussed in the literature so far by means of a corpus search and annotation of relevant referential parameters and using data from story continuation, comprehension and eye tracking experiments.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants