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Bridging uses of demonstrative pronouns in German

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Abstract

The goal of this paper is to revisit the phenomenon of bridging anaphora (Clark, in: Johnson-Laird, Wason (eds) Thinking: readings in cognitive science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 411–420, 1977) from the perspective of the German demonstrative plural pronoun die ‘they’. I argue that antecedentless die ‘they’ can be analyzed as a novel definite that is licensed by a suitable, contextually given situation and denotes the salient person(s) who stand in a contextually given relation to that situation. Subsequently, I propose a formal semantic implementation of my analysis in terms of Elbourne (Situations and individuals, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2005; Definite descriptions, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013), analyzing the antecedentless demonstrative pronoun die ‘they’ as a definite description in disguise.

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Acknowledgements

For helpful comments and discussion, I would like to thank Maria Averintseva-Klisch, Katrin Axel-Tober, Sebastian Bücking, Christian Fortmann, Willi Geuder, Dag Haug, Irene Heim, Klaus von Heusinger, Pritty Patel-Grosz, Philippe Schlenker, Britta Stolterfoht, Sarah Zobel and two anonymous reviewers, as well the audiences at the 2011 Göttingen workshop “Indefinites and Beyond”, at LAGB 2013 and at the departmental colloquium of the German Language Department at the University of Tübingen. A corpus study with the DeWaC corpus that contributed to this publication was carried out with the help of research assistant Jana Grob. For feedback during the publication process, I would like to thank the managing editors Daniel Büring and Malte Zimmermann. This research project was partially supported by Grant 32-01/12 from the Daimler and Benz Foundation and by Grant 09021401 from the University of Tübingen.

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  1. Institutt for lingvistiske og nordiske studier, Universitetet i Oslo, Postboks 1102, Blindern, 0317, Oslo, Norway

    Patrick Georg Grosz

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Grosz, P.G. Bridging uses of demonstrative pronouns in German. Linguist and Philos 41, 367–421 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-017-9226-7

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