“I broke a finger”: A salience-based cognitive model for selecting a or my with inalienable possessions

Jori Lindley

doi:10.1515/ip-2015-0011

Article

“I broke a finger”: A salience-based cognitive model for selecting a or my with inalienable possessions

Jori Lindley
Jori Lindley is a doctoral student in the Applied Linguistics Department of the University of California, Los Angeles. Her graduate work thus far has involved applying corpus methods and cognitive-functional approaches to topics such as pronouns, definite and indefinite articles, salience, semantic prosody, and, most recently, the adverbs of frequency always and never. Other research interests of hers include syntactic resonance and language change.

Published/Copyright: May 22, 2015

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From the journal Intercultural Pragmatics Volume 12 Issue 2

Abstract

The fact that a speaker can say “I broke a finger” in reference to her own finger was first noted by Grice. Building on implicature-based accounts of how and why this works, this large-scale corpus study focuses on the choice, in such utterances, between the indefinite article a and the possessive determiner my, and what motivates that choice. The phrases investigated involve inalienable possessions (body parts and kin) and adversative events. It is claimed that, in such phrases, a is associated with low salience and my with high salience, salience itself being determined by multiple factors which fall under either Salience of O (the object) or Salience of E (the event). Specifically, I show that my is associated with objects low in number and present, with events that are real and recent, and with both objects and events to which we have a high degree of sensory access, while a is associated with the opposite.

About the author

Jori Lindley

Jori Lindley is a doctoral student in the Applied Linguistics Department of the University of California, Los Angeles. Her graduate work thus far has involved applying corpus methods and cognitive-functional approaches to topics such as pronouns, definite and indefinite articles, salience, semantic prosody, and, most recently, the adverbs of frequency always and never. Other research interests of hers include syntactic resonance and language change.

Acknowledgments

I am extremely grateful to my two anonymous reviewers and Beniah Suddath for their detailed feedback.

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Published Online: 2015-5-22

Published in Print: 2015-6-1

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https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2015-0011