On Definite Reference in World Englishes

There is reason to think that the distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions is an instance of a general distinction that also applies to uses of proper names (Saul Kripke, “Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy II 1977). This means that if, as many have argued (against Kripke), the referential-attributive distinction has semantic significance, then the reference of a proper name, as used on a given occasion, may depend on whether or not the name is used referentially on that occasion. The present paper aims to do two things. First, the paper generalizes the referential-attributive distinction in a way that is different from Kripke’s generalization, but still applies to proper names as well as to definite descriptions. This general distinction is between what I call targeted and untargeted uses of noun phrases, including both definite descriptions and proper names. Second, the paper aims to show that targeted uses of proper names are regular and standard, just as targeted (i.e., referential) uses of definite descriptions are. This is important because the most prominent argument for the semantic significance of the referential use of definite descriptions, known as the “Argument from Convention,” is based on the referential use being regular and standard. Having established that the targeted use of proper names is also regular and standard, we are in a position to make a similar argument for the semantic significance of the targeted use of proper names.

The argument from convention contends that the regular use of definite descriptions as referential devices strongly implies that a referential semantic convention underlies such usage. On the presumption that definite descriptions also participate in a quantificational semantic convention, the argument from convention has served as an argument for the thesis that the English definite article is ambiguous. Here, I revisit this relatively new argument. First, I address two recurring criticisms of the argument from convention: (1) its alleged tendency to overgenerate and (2) its apparent evidential inadequacy. These criticisms are found wanting. Second, following Zacharska (Univ Coll Lond Work Pap Linguist 22:56–63, 2010), I argue that while the argument from convention does alter the landscape of logical possibilities insofar as it provides good grounds for treating Donnellan’s (Philos Rev 75:281–304, 1966) referential–attributive distinction as having truth-conditional consequences, the argument from convention nonetheless fails to demonstrate that ‘the’ requires two lexical entries.

Noun Phrases

494 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 76, NUMBER 2 (2000) that performance on neuropsychological tests—and indeed, the organization of the brain—are heavily influenced by literacy and concomitant factors such as schooling. Ch. 8, 'Aphasia in users of signed languages ', by David Corina summarizes the available case studies of aphasie signers and spells out some of their theoretical implications. Ch. 9, 'How typical are the atypical aphasie populations ?', by the three editors concludes that 'language lateralization or representation' is essentially the same in most of the populations studied in the book as in the 'typical' cases. Hence, '[!language organization is much more universal than previously assumed. The current model can indeed apply to the "atypical" populations described in this volume' (312). These conclusions are somewhat surprising since several of the chapters present serious challenges for models exclusively designed to account for 'typical' cases. The overall conclusion one can draw from this volume is that the study of atypical populations is a valuable tool for the study of the typical brain precisely because many facts about atypical aphasia parallel those observed in typical aphasia. The volume also includes author and subject indices . A more sophisticated subject index would have been helpful. For example, under 'language processing ' the reader will find 26 page references but without any indication as to what aspect of processing might be discussed in those pages. Similarly, there is an entry for 'contrastive stress' but none for 'stress'. In the spirit of this volume, the list of criteria that define typicality could be continued and so could the list of future useful contributions. Female vs. male patients and patients with multiple lesions are only two possible foci that come to mind. The main interest of the book lies, above all, in the empirical scope of the material, which will make it a useful reference for researchers in language processing in normal and clinical populations. [Susanne Gahl, Harvard University.] Definiteness. By Christopher Lyons. (Cambridge textbooks in linguistics.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xx, 380. This book begins with a basic observation that noun phrases like the car, proper nouns, possessives, personal pronouns, demonstratives, and universal quantifiers refer to identifiable objects or represent the totality of conceivable objects which match the description in a given context. In other words, definiteness has something to do with the identifiability or the inclusiveness of the description. This observation provides a starting point forthe survey ofvarious manifestations of definiteness in Ch. 2: articles, lexical and morphological devices, syntactic agreement involving adpositions, pronouns, or word order. Two important facts emerge: (1) The definite article is not always in a complementary distribution with the indefinite article. (2) There is no definable correlation between the way languages encode definiteness and their common typological features. Further examination in Ch. 3 of noun phrases whose definiteness is due to something other than the use of articles shows that, although definiteness is associated with the Det(erminer) position, it cannot be said that this feature is universal. Some languages lack definiteness marking in their noun phrase structure. Chs. 4-6 contain detailed treatments of various topics connected with definiteness: the semantic and pragmatic manifestations of identifiability and their various nuances (Ch. 4); the interaction between definiteness and direct object marking, verb agreement, animacy, article and nominal feature marking, empty category, classifiers (Ch. 5); definiteness effects in existential sentences, superlatives, extraposition, and the organization of information within a discourse (Ch. 6). The foregoing survey leads Lyons to characterize definiteness as a morphosyntactic category which represents the semantic and pragmatic notions of identifiability (Ch. 7). Languages can be grouped according to how they grammaticalize definiteness: Type I exhibits no grammatical definiteness (Tapanese , Korean); Type II marks definiteness in pronominal noun phrases (Latin, Russian); Type III encodes definiteness in pronominal and full noun phrases (English, French). This chapter is a transition to the more theoretical analysis in Chs. 8-9. L argues in Ch. 8 that, although the basic DP framework has some advantage over traditional NP analysis, it cannot satisfactorily explain the syntax of definiteness either. To remedy this, L suggests that free-form articles like the be treated, as in NP analysis, as specifiers rather than heads, but specifiers of DP rather...

Corpus linguistics has emerged as one of the most dynamic fields in English language studies, offering empirical insights into patterns of vocabulary, grammar, discourse, and variation across diverse contexts. Over the past three decades, the scope of corpus studies has expanded remarkably, moving beyond early text collections such as the Brown Corpus to vast learner corpora, multimodal resources, and real-time social media datasets. This review article examines the current trends shaping corpus research and highlights promising future directions. Current scholarship demonstrates an increasing interest in world Englishes, learner corpora, and corpus-assisted discourse analysis, particularly in political and media communication. At the same time, new applications in pedagogy, translation, and forensic linguistics illustrate the methodological versatility of corpus approaches. Advances in computational tools and natural language processing have further broadened possibilities for large-scale, automated analysis of language data. However, challenges remain concerning representativeness, ethical issues in digital corpora, and the balance between quantitative and qualitative methods. Looking ahead, corpus studies are expected to place greater emphasis on under-represented English varieties, including South Asian and African Englishes, as well as on the integration of multimodal data and artificial intelligence techniques. This review argues that corpus linguistics is not only consolidating its role as a central methodology in applied linguistics but also redefining how scholars conceptualize language use in global, digital, and multilingual contexts.

BiotecVisions 2012, April

Definiteness is a semantic-pragmatic notion that is closely associated with the use of the definite article (or determiner) in languages like English, Hungarian, Hebrew, and Lakhota. The definite article can be used in different conditions: deictic, anaphoric, unique, and certain indirect uses, often also called “bridging uses.” Accordingly, there are different semantic theories of definiteness, such as the salience theory, the familiarity or identifiability theory, and the uniqueness or inclusiveness theory. Definite expressions cover personal pronouns, proper names, demonstratives, definite noun phrases, and universally quantified expressions. Noun phrases with the definite article, known as “definite descriptions,” are a key issue in semantics and analytic philosophy with respect to the interaction of reference and description in identifying an object. The research and analysis of definiteness is of great importance not only for the linguistic structure of languages but also for our understanding of reference and referring in philosophy, cognitive science, computational linguistics, and communication science.

The Objectives of this paper are to describe the realization of language styles used by male and female teacher and the reasons of the using those language styles. The subjects were the teachers of SMP Negeri Pancur batu, they were four English teachers, consits of two male teachers and two female teachers. It was qualitative explanative research designs. The researcher observed the teachers while teaching in order to get the teachers language styles taking place during their teaching in the classroom related to the theory of Tannen, who divides the way of communication into six categories; pairs a contrasting use of language by males and females, they are: status versus support, independence versus intimacy, advice versus understanding, information versus feeling, orders versus proposal and conflict versus compromise. .The results of the data analysis showed that the. The language styles of the male and female teacher were different in the way of communication. The realization of language styles by the teachers’ way of speaking mostly occur in male teachers’ is orders which is 13 utterances (38.2%), then followed by advice which is 11 utterances (32.4%), then continued by information 6 utterences (20,6%) and then conflict 2 utterances (5,9%) and the last is status 1 utterances (2.9%). Female teachers’ way in communication was mostly realized by orders which is 10 utterances (29.4%), then followed by feeling which is 8 utterances (23.5%), and then continued by understanding which is 7 utternces (20.6%), and then support which is 5 utterances (14.7%), and the last is proposal which is 4 utterances (11.8%). Besides, it can be seen that eventhough Tannen (1992) suggested the orders were categorized for male way’s of speaking , but based on this study, orders were found in the female teachers’ way of speaking. There were 29.4% the utterances realized by orders although that criteria is not classified to female. In fact, those way of speaking were the most used in the female teachers. According to the male and female teachers all the ways of communication are expressed to encourage the students to reach the lesson competencies well.Keywords:English Teachers, Language Styles, Way of communication,

The noun phrase (NP) is at the heart of several studies investigating regional variation in varieties of English. While so far the bulk of research has focused on isolated structural features, the present study is a comparative analysis of NP complexity across varieties of English. NP complexity is compared across five regional varieties and four text categories, based on data from the International Corpus of English. The study adopts a multinomial regression approach, which takes into consideration the interaction of three potential predictors: syntactic function, text type, and variety. The results underline the need for text-type-sensitive studies and add to an understanding of syntactic contact phenomena in varieties of English. More specifically, we find marked differences in the predictive power of the variables and illustrate how focusing on the interaction of syntactic functions, text type and regional variety contributes to a systematic description of variation in the NP in world Englishes.

Three groups of 11-year old children institutionalized and non-institutionalized retardates and normals, were compared in their language usage on responses to TAT cards. The distribution of their words into common and uncommon, and over the part of speech categories was analysed, as well as the complexity and diversity of their sentences, verb and noun phrases. Retarded children did not differ from normal children in their usage of common and uncommon words, nor in their use of part of speech categories. Also, their verb phrases and noun phrases were in many respects comparable to those used by normal children. The clearest differences were found in the measures of sentence complexity and diversity: institutionalized retardates received the lowest scores of the three groups on these measures (significantly lower than the scores of the normal children), the scores of the non-institutionalized retardates were intermediate and those of the normal children the highest. Additional comparisons of the patterns of scores with those received by younger children showed that the institutionalized retardates were most comparable to normal 5-year olds, particularly in their sentence usage, whereas the non-institutionalized retardates were most comparable to normal children of the same chronological age.

Concealed question noun phrases headed by the definite article have been analysed as contributing the intension of the noun phrase –an individual concept– as semantic argument of the verb. Concealed questions with quantifiers challenge this analysis. Several empirical observations will be presented and an analysis will be sketched that treats this quantification as external to the concealed question itself, making it parallel to quantificational adverbs with interrogative clauses and plural individuals. This way, the basic individual concept analysis is maintained.KeywordsConcealed questionquantifiersquantificational variability effectquantificational adverbquestioninterrogative clauseplurality

This research was primarily conducted to find out the total amount of grammatical errors and to analyze kinds of morphological and syntactical errors made by the fifth semester students of English Language Education Study Program of Catholic University of Saint Thomas in the Academic Year of 2018/2019 in their English compositions. There are 22 students as the research subject of the study. The writers collected the data by asking the students to write down an English composition entitled My Unforgettable Experience. The grammatical errors made by the students were analyzed based on linguistic category taxonomy (morphological and syntactical errors) proposed by Dulay et al (1982). Based on the data analysis, it was found that there are 400 grammatical errors altogether (277 morphological errors and 123 syntactical errors) made by the research subject in their English compositions. In morphological errors, the students dominantly made errors in past tense, namely 247 errors (89.2%). Next, the students made 14 errors in definite article (5.0%), 10 errors in third singular verb (3.6%), 2 errors in comparative adjective/adverb (0.7%), 2 errors in regular/irregular verbs (0.7%), 1 error in possessive case (0.4%), and 1 error in past participle (0.4%). In syntactical errors, the students dominantly made errors in transformation, namely 42 errors (34.15%). Next, the students made 30 errors in verb construction (24.39%), 25 errors in word order (20.33%), 24 errors in verb phrase (19.51%), and 2 errors in noun phrase (1.62%). It is advisable that the students had better master English grammar very well and need to equip themselves with at least a number of fundamental abilities such as how to use punctuations and construct simple sentences in the English language correctly, and the English teachers/lecturers had better explain English grammar and teach how to construct simple sentences in the English language correctly.
 
 Keywords: Error analysis, grammatical errors, morphological errors, syntactical errors, English compositions

While the bulk of feedback studies have focused on written corrective feedback, oral feedback in teacher-student writing conferences in EFL context has been underexplored. This article investigated teacher oral feedback based on the tenets of sociocultural theory. It examined the impact of teacher-student writing conferences on students’ accuracy and frequency of cohesive devices employment. The study followed a quasi-experimental design with a pre-test, intervention and post-test. Data were collected from an intensive writing course for intermediate students at the college level. Based on guided-free writing prompts, the students had to write argumentative paragraphs of about 150–180 words followed by individual conference sessions to offer them oral feedback. The findings showed that oral feedback in writing conferences statistically impacted the students’ writing performance with huge effect size (Cohen’s d = 2.19). Moreover, the results demonstrated empirical evidence that writing conferences positively impacted the students’ frequency of employing referential markers (t value = − 3.011; p = 0.006 < 0.05) and conjunctions (t value = − 2.200; p = 0.039 < 0.05). Further, oral feedback statistically impacted the students’ accuracy of utilizing referential markers (t value = − 6.874; p = 0.000 < 0.05) and conjunctions (t value = − 7.253; p = 0.000 < 0.05). Writing conferences provided mediated learning experience for the students. The oral feedback assisted the students to decrease the overuse of the first, second person pronouns and the definite article ‘the’ with generic meaning in their writing. Instead, they depended on noun phrases and the third person pronouns which contributed to the text overall cohesion by creating explicit chains of references to the antecedents within the textual environment. Also, oral feedback helped the students to use conjunctions appropriately and accurately, so their texts were written densely cohesive. Pedagogical implications were discussed at the end of the article.

This chapter examines the interaction between the occurrence of relative clauses (RCs) in noun phrases, and the choice of full or reduced definite articles on the relativised (head) nouns. It summarizes the properties of reduced and full definite determiners found in West Germanic. The chapter discusses the definition of restrictive RCs, showing that the restrictive RCs considered in the literature are only a subclass of restrictive relatives. It discusses data from the Vorarlberger dialect, Standard German and Fehring Frisian in the light of the proposed classification of RCs. The chapter shows that the restriction on restrictive RCs stated in the literature does not concern restrictive relatives in general, but only one of the subtypes identified, namely contrastive RCs. It shows that other types of restrictive relatives co-occur with reduced definite determiners in Fehring Frisian as described by Ebert (1970, 1971), and in the Vorarlberger dialect. Keywords: definite articles; Fehring Frisian; restrictive relative clauses (RC); Vorarlberger dialect; West Germanic

Technology has been the major enabling factor in the growth of corpus linguistics but has both shaped and been shaped by it. Corpus Linguistics (CL), for many, is an end it itself. That is, it provides a means for the empirical analysis of language and in so doing adds to its definition and description. Individuals such as Johns and Tribble have, for many years, championed the use of corpora in language learning in the form of Data-driven Learning (DDL). Analysing discourse is another area where CL has been adopted as a means of looking at language patterns over much larger datasets. Pragmatics is the study of language in use and so CL seems a logical ally to the field. The interest in non-formal features of language provides a natural territory of expansion for CL into sociolinguistics and other areas of language in society such as media discourse and political discourse.