In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
A noun is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.
In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA).
In linguistics, deixis is the use of general words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context, e.g., the words tomorrow, there, and they. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denoted meaning varies depending on time and/or place. Words or phrases that require contextual information to be fully understood—for example, English pronouns—are deictic. Deixis is closely related to anaphora. Although this article deals primarily with deixis in spoken language, the concept is sometimes applied to written language, gestures, and communication media as well. In linguistic anthropology, deixis is treated as a particular subclass of the more general semiotic phenomenon of indexicality, a sign "pointing to" some aspect of its context of occurrence.
In grammar, an article is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech.
Mbula is an Austronesian language spoken by around 2,500 people on Umboi Island and Sakar Island in the Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea. Its basic word order is subject–verb–object; it has a nominative–accusative case-marking strategy.
In linguistics, anaphora is the use of an expression whose interpretation depends upon another expression in context. In a narrower sense, anaphora is the use of an expression that depends specifically upon an antecedent expression and thus is contrasted with cataphora, which is the use of an expression that depends upon a postcedent expression. The anaphoric (referring) term is called an anaphor. For example, in the sentence Sally arrived, but nobody saw her, the pronoun her is an anaphor, referring back to the antecedent Sally. In the sentence Before her arrival, nobody saw Sally, the pronoun her refers forward to the postcedent Sally, so her is now a cataphor. Usually, an anaphoric expression is a pro-form or some other kind of deictic expression. Both anaphora and cataphora are species of endophora, referring to something mentioned elsewhere in a dialog or text.
In linguistics, coreference, sometimes written co-reference, occurs when two or more expressions refer to the same person or thing; they have the same referent. For example, in Bill said Alice would arrive soon, and she did, the words Alice and she refer to the same person.
A referent is a person or thing to which a name – a linguistic expression or other symbol – refers. For example, in the sentence Mary saw me, the referent of the word Mary is the particular person called Mary who is being spoken of, while the referent of the word me is the person uttering the sentence.
In formal linguistics, discourse representation theory (DRT) is a framework for exploring meaning under a formal semantics approach. One of the main differences between DRT-style approaches and traditional Montagovian approaches is that DRT includes a level of abstract mental representations within its formalism, which gives it an intrinsic ability to handle meaning across sentence boundaries. DRT was created by Hans Kamp in 1981. A very similar theory was developed independently by Irene Heim in 1982, under the name of File Change Semantics (FCS). Discourse representation theories have been used to implement semantic parsers and natural language understanding systems.
A determiner, also called determinative, is a word, phrase, or affix that occurs together with a noun or noun phrase and generally serves to express the reference of that noun or noun phrase in the context. That is, a determiner may indicate whether the noun is referring to a definite or indefinite element of a class, to a closer or more distant element, to an element belonging to a specified person or thing, to a particular number or quantity, etc. Common kinds of determiners include definite and indefinite articles, demonstratives, possessive determiners, cardinal numerals, quantifiers, distributive determiners, and interrogative determiners.
Vietnamese is an analytic language, meaning it conveys grammatical information primarily through combinations of words as opposed to suffixes. The basic word order is subject-verb-object (SVO), but utterances may be restructured so as to be topic-prominent. Vietnamese also has verb serialization. In Vietnamese the head of the phrase usually precedes its complements, nouns are classified according to series of lexical parameters, and pronouns may be absent from utterances. Question words in the language occur in the end of the utterance (wh-in-situ),
Donkey sentences are sentences that contain a pronoun with clear meaning but whose syntactical role in the sentence poses challenges to grammarians. Such sentences defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents. The difficulty is with understanding how English speakers parse such sentences.
Referring expression generation (REG) is the subtask of natural language generation (NLG) that received most scholarly attention. While NLG is concerned with the conversion of non-linguistic information into natural language, REG focuses only on the creation of referring expressions that identify specific entities called targets.
The term equative is used in linguistics to refer to constructions where two entities are equated with each other. For example, the sentence Susan is our president, equates two entities "Susan" and "our president". In English, equatives are typically expressed using a copular verb such as "be", although this is not the only use of this verb. Equatives can be contrasted with predicative constructions where one entity is identified as a member of a set, such as Susan is a president. This view has been contrasted by Otto Jespersen in the first part of the XX century and by Giuseppe Longobardi and Andrea Moro in the second. In particular, Andrea Moro in 1988 proved that either demonstrative phrases (DP) must be non referential in the sense of Geach (1962) by exploiting arguments based on binding theory. The idea is that when a DP plays the role of predicate it enlarges its binding domain: for example, in John met his cook the pronoun can refer to the subject John but in John is his cook it cannot. The key-step was to admit that the DP following the copula can be referential whereas the one preceding must not, in other words the key-step was to admit that there can be inverse copular sentences, namely those where the subject, which is referential, follows the predicate. For a discussion starting from Moro's data see Heycock (2012). For a historical view of the development of the analysis of the copula see Moro
Logophoricity is a phenomenon of binding relation that may employ a morphologically different set of anaphoric forms, in the context where the referent is an entity whose speech, thoughts, or feelings are being reported. This entity may or may not be distant from the discourse, but the referent must reside in a clause external to the one in which the logophor resides. The specially-formed anaphors that are morphologically distinct from the typical pronouns of a language are known as logophoric pronouns, originally coined by the linguist Claude Hagège. The linguistic importance of logophoricity is its capability to do away with ambiguity as to who is being referred to. A crucial element of logophoricity is the logophoric context, defined as the environment where use of logophoric pronouns is possible. Several syntactic and semantic accounts have been suggested. While some languages may not be purely logophoric, logophoric context may still be found in those languages; in those cases, it is common to find that in the place where logophoric pronouns would typically occur, non-clause-bounded reflexive pronouns appear instead.
Papuan Malay or Irian Malay is a Malay-based creole language spoken in the Indonesian part of New Guinea. It emerged as a contact language among tribes in Indonesian New Guinea for trading and daily communication. Nowadays, it has a growing number of native speakers. More recently, the vernacular of Indonesian Papuans has been influenced by Standard Indonesian, the national standard dialect. It is spoken in Indonesian New Guinea alongside 274 other languages and functions as a lingua franca.
English determiners are words – such as the, a, each, some, which, this, and numerals such as six – that are most commonly used with nouns to specify their referents. The determiners form a closed lexical category in English.
In linguistics, specificity is a semantic feature of noun phrases (NPs) that distinguishes between entities/nouns/referents that are unique in a given context and those that are not. Several distinct known factors determine an entity/noun/referent's relative specificity, including:
In linguistics, givenness is a phenomenon in which a speaker assumes that contextual information of a topic of discourse is already known to the listener. The speaker thus considers it unnecessary to supply further contextual information through an expression's linguistic properties, its syntactic form or position, or its patterns of stress and intonation. Givenness involves contextual information in a discourse that is given, or assumed to be known, by the addressee in the moment of utterance. Therefore, a given expression must be known from prior discourse.
