Lexical anaphors in Danish and French
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Lita Lundquist
Abstract
The article treats lexically varied noun-phrase anaphors, so-called ‘unfaithful anaphors’, which are found more frequently in French than in Danish texts. The difference is related to more fundamental differences between the two languages, and types of language, at different linguistic levels. Thus, French lexicalises more semantic content in nouns than in verbs, and vice versa in Danish, the former language preferring exocentric ordering at the syntactic level compared to Danish endocentric ordering. Much of the information of unfaithful anaphors being new, French can be said to communicate presupposed information, where Danish ‘poses’, i.e. states new information. And finally, in French the semantic content of an unfaithful anaphor often entertains a rhetorical relation with its host predicate, where Danish sets the relation explicitly.
Abstract
The article treats lexically varied noun-phrase anaphors, so-called ‘unfaithful anaphors’, which are found more frequently in French than in Danish texts. The difference is related to more fundamental differences between the two languages, and types of language, at different linguistic levels. Thus, French lexicalises more semantic content in nouns than in verbs, and vice versa in Danish, the former language preferring exocentric ordering at the syntactic level compared to Danish endocentric ordering. Much of the information of unfaithful anaphors being new, French can be said to communicate presupposed information, where Danish ‘poses’, i.e. states new information. And finally, in French the semantic content of an unfaithful anaphor often entertains a rhetorical relation with its host predicate, where Danish sets the relation explicitly.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Anaphors in text – Introduction vii
-
Anaphors in Cognitive, Text- and Discourse Linguistics
- Indirect anaphora in text 3
- Indirect pronominal anaphora in English and French 21
- Lexical anaphors in Danish and French 37
- Referential collaboration with computers 49
- Reflexivity and temporality in discourse deixis 69
- The function of complex anaphors in texts 81
- Metaphorical anaphors 103
-
The Syntax and Semantic of Anaphors
- Accessibility and definite noun phrases 123
- The non-subject bias of German demonstrative pronouns 145
- Anaphoric properties of German right dislocation 165
- Antecedents of diverse types 183
- Corpus-based and machine learning approaches to anaphora resolution 207
-
Neurolinguistic Studies
- Neuroimaging studies of coherence processes 225
- Reference assignment in the absence of sufficient semantic content 241
- Resolving complex anaphors 259
- Index 279
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Anaphors in text – Introduction vii
-
Anaphors in Cognitive, Text- and Discourse Linguistics
- Indirect anaphora in text 3
- Indirect pronominal anaphora in English and French 21
- Lexical anaphors in Danish and French 37
- Referential collaboration with computers 49
- Reflexivity and temporality in discourse deixis 69
- The function of complex anaphors in texts 81
- Metaphorical anaphors 103
-
The Syntax and Semantic of Anaphors
- Accessibility and definite noun phrases 123
- The non-subject bias of German demonstrative pronouns 145
- Anaphoric properties of German right dislocation 165
- Antecedents of diverse types 183
- Corpus-based and machine learning approaches to anaphora resolution 207
-
Neurolinguistic Studies
- Neuroimaging studies of coherence processes 225
- Reference assignment in the absence of sufficient semantic content 241
- Resolving complex anaphors 259
- Index 279
