Scope Limitation = Definiteness

Author: (English) Leonids
Publisher:
Publishing Time: 2005-04-01
Features: This book elaborates on what constitutes the category of definiteness and how languages express it from the perspectives of linguistic comparison and theoretical linguistics. Although definiteness is a universal concept at the pragmatic level, not all languages have a category of definiteness. In many languages, it is merely reflected in the pronoun system. The category of definiteness tends to be subsumed by the category of person. Possessives do not inherently imply a definite relationship. The author of this work has collected a large number of languages to examine their definiteness categories and the various grammatical expressions related to them (e.g., demonstratives, possessives, personal pronouns, etc.), as well as the emergence and evolution of definite markers. The discussion unfolds from multiple levels of contemporary semantics, pragmatics, and syntax, yielding many highly enlightening findings.