Читать книгу Special Indefinites in Sentence and Discourse - Sofiana Lindemann - Страница 9

Before presenting the outline of this book, I will enumerate several limitations of this investigation. First, this book is focused on the semantic and discourse-pragmatic functions of indefinite noun phrases. While I will include brief discussions on other types of referring expressions, especially when dealing with notions such as activation, accessibility and topicality, future research will show to what extend the analysis put forth in this book is applicable to other types of referring expressions as well. More recent investigations on the discourse-pragmatic effects of pe-marking as differential object marking in Romanian (Lindemann 2018) bring promising evidence for an analysis of definite noun phrases in terms of discourse structuring devices as well.

Second, I restrict my analysis to indefinite noun phrases found in direct object position and do not discuss the semantic and discourse-pragmatic contribution of indefinites in subject position. One of the reasons that contributed to this decision is the intention to compare the observations and experimental results from the three languages under scrutinity. As Romanian pe-marking only occurs with direct objects, I limited the analysis of indefinite this in English and so’n in German to their distribution in direct object position. Another reason for concentrating on the direct object position is due to the well-attested bias of subject referents to be associated with highly accessible referents and of direct object referents to be associated with less accessible referents. Previous research has neglected the investigation of referents associated with less accessible referents, or has tested them indirectly, by comparison to the most accessible referent in the sentence. Thus, the results put forth here provide novel insights into the ranking of referents and the factors that contribute to this ranking in multi-sentence contexts.