TY  - CHAP
A1  - Portner, Paul
T1  - Topicality and (Non-)Specificity in Mandarin
T2  - Information Structure and the referential status of linguistic expressions : Workshop as part of the 23 annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft in Leipzig ; Leipzig, February 28 - March 2, 2002
N2  - Current analyses of specificity are unable to provide an explanatory account for why specific and nonspecific uses of indefinites are available. While Abusch (1994), Reinhart (1997), and Kratzer (1998) provide successful mechanisms for deriving specific readings, they do not provide a fundamental explanation for the availability of this mechanism. This is due to the fact that specific indefinites are treated as involving an interpretive component or procedure unique to themselves: storage (Abusch) or choice function (Reinhart and Kratzer), for example. It would be preferable if specific indefinites could be understood as deriving from the use of independently motivated meaning components and interpretive mechanisms.
Here I will pursue the idea, building on Portner & Yabushita (1998), that specificity has to do with the indefinite's interaction with a topical domain (note similarities with the proposals of Enç 1991, Cresti 1995, and Schwarzschild 2000). In this conception, specificity is a matter of degree: the narrower the topical domain, the more specific the indefinite. More precisely, sentences containing specific indefinites will be understood as involving ordinary existential quantification in combination with a topical domain function.
KW  - Chinesisch
KW  - Topik
KW  - Informationsstruktur
Y1  - 2001
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/30805
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-308059
UR  - http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/fileadmin/material/ZASPiL_Volltexte/zp23/zaspil23-portner.pdf
SN  - 1435-9588
SN  - 0947-7055
VL  - 23
SP  - 171
EP  - 179
PB  - Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung
CY  - Berlin
ER  -