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Nominal speech act structure: Evidence from the structural deficiency of impersonal pronouns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2019

Elizabeth Ritter Open the ORCID record for Elizabeth Ritter [Opens in a new window]  and
Martina Wiltschko
Elizabeth Ritter*
Affiliation:
University of Calgary
Martina Wiltschko*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
*
ritter@ucalgary.ca
martina.wiltschko@ubc.ca
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Abstract

In this paper, we propose that there is a speech-act structure in the nominal spine, just as there is in the clausal spine. Its function is to encode what we do when we utter a nominal: that is, we name, describe, or track individuals. Thus, speech-act structure establishes a link between the discourse referent and the speech-act situation. The evidence we discuss comes from nominals that lack this speech-act structure, namely impersonal pronouns. We argue that impersonal pronouns have in common that they lack nominal speech-act structure but are not otherwise a natural class: they vary in syntactic structure. Thus, we propose a novel formal typology of impersonal pronouns.

Résumé

Dans cet article, nous proposons qu'il existe une structure d'actes de parole dans l’épine nominale, tout comme dans l’épine clausale, dont la fonction est de coder ce que nous faisons lorsque nous prononçons un nominal : nous nommons, décrivons ou gardons une trace d'un individu. Ainsi, la structure de l'acte de parole établit un lien entre le référent dans le discours et la situation de l'acte de parole. Les preuves dont nous discutons proviennent de nominaux dépourvus de cette structure d'actes de parole, à savoir les pronoms impersonnels. Nous soutenons que les pronoms impersonnels ont en commun l'absence de la structure nominale d'actes de parole, mais qu'ils ne constituent pas une classe naturelle : ils présentent plusieurs structures syntaxiques différentes. Nous proposons donc une nouvelle typologie formelle des pronoms impersonnels.

Keywords

impersonal pronounsnominal speech actspronoms impersonnelsactes de parole nominales
Type
Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 64 , Issue 4 , December 2019 , pp. 709 - 729
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association/Association canadienne de linguistique 2019 

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Footnotes

This work was supported by SSHRC grant No. 435-2018-1011. We would like to thank the participants and organizers of the University of Manitoba Workshop on Person and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions.

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