主题：

Indefiniteness and Quantification

 

 

时间：2013年11月8日下午14：00-16：00

 

 

地点：北京大学民主楼208教室

 

主讲人简介：

Ronald Wayne Langacker (1942-) is professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, who is best known as one of the founders of the cognitive linguistics movement and the creator of Cognitive Grammar.

Langacker received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1966. From 1966 until 2003, he was professor of linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. From 1997 until 1999 he also served as president of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association.

Langacker develops the central ideas of Cognitive Grammar in his seminal, two-volume Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, which became a major departure point for the emerging field of Cognitive Linguistics.

Abstract: Grounding has the discursive function of indicating the epistemic status of a nominal referent. Definiteness depends on whether the referent is identifiable to both interlocutors on the basis of the current discourse space (CDS), independently of the content of the current clause. Since the CDS includes the unfolding discourse, an unidentified referent is identified for subsequent discourse purposes because the clause containing it gives it a place in the updated CDS. Instead of definite and indefinite articles, many languages have implicit grounding by discourse-level constructions. From the hearer’s standpoint, an indefinite referent is momentarily virtual, without a known place in the substrate; the clausal content determines whether its existential status changes (becoming actual). Virtual referents serve important functions, such as making generalizations. The referents of relative quantifiers (e.g. all, most, every) are necessarily virtual. These grounding elements allow generalizations by indicating degree of universality within the maximal extension (ME) of a type (the totality of its instances); some characterize the referent as a proportion of ME, while others profile a virtual instance construed as representative. Rather than the maximal extension, a generalization sometimes covers a contextually relevant extension (RE). Certain grammatical constructions have the function of making RE explicit.

发布时间：2013-11-05 12:16:34