Decomposing pronominal meaning
Patricia Amaral
Indiana University
Abstract
This paper examines the morphosyntactic and semantic/pragmatic properties of a set of NPs in European Portuguese (EP) that refer to the addressee and are formed by the definite article and a noun, as in (1). First, I present a number of tests showing that these forms are pronouns rather than regular NPs; I show that they are part of the paradigm of personal pronouns in EP. I present several types of criteria: (i) formal properties (relation with stressed personal pronouns, no possible adjectival modification of the noun, restriction on determiners, relation with reflexives, closed class), and (ii) the relationship with other pronominal forms in EP. Second, I analyze these pronouns as having multidimensional meaning (Potts 2005; Gutzmann 2015) and discuss the theoretical status of their meaning components.
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[Addressing Pedro/the speaker’s father]
O Pedro/ o Pai quer um café?
art.def.m.sg Pedro/ art.def.m.sg father want.prs.3sg art.indef.m.sg coffee
‘Do you [lit. the Pedro/the father] want a coffee?’
These forms display a bundle of conventional, encoded meaning components not previously described in the literature: (i) they refer to the addressee (i.e. they have a deictic component), (ii) the property conveyed by the noun is predicated of the addressee (property component), and (iii) the speaker expresses social distance towards the addressee (expressive component, in the sense of Potts 2005, 2007). While the deictic component is primary, at-issue information, the other components are secondary, not-at-issue information, i.e. they are subsidiary to the main content of the utterance and provide conditions that restrict the felicitous use of the sentence containing them. In this paper I focus particularly on the property and expressive components and on discussing the criteria for their classification.
This paper contributes to our knowledge of not-at-issue meaning and on its expression in the grammar, in a closed system like that of personal pronouns. It also adds to the study of referential expressions that have multidimensional meaning (e.g. honorifics and “imposters”).
References: Bhat, Shankara (2004) Pronouns. Oxford: OUP. • Collins, Chris and Paul Postal (2012) Imposters. A study of pronominal agreement. Cambridge, MIT: MIT Press. • Gutzmann, Daniel (2015) Use-conditional meaning. Studies in multidimensional semantics. Oxford: OUP. • Potts, Christopher (2005) The Logic of Conventional Implicature. Oxford: OUP. • Potts, Christopher (2007) The expressive dimension. Theoretical Linguistics 33 (2): 165-197.