About the Speaker - Towards a Syntax of Indexicality

Informationen zum Autor Alessandra Giorgi is Professor of Linguistics, University of Venice. Her recent publications include articles and chapters on the syntax and semantics of anaphoric expressions. She is the author of The Syntax of Noun Phrases (CUP, 1991) and Tense and Aspect: from Semantics to Morphosyntax (OUP, 1997). Klappentext Alessandra Giorgi considers the semantic and syntactic nature of indexicals: linguistic expressions whose reference shifts from utterance to utterance. Zusammenfassung This book considers important aspects of the syntax of sentences and their relation to the extra-sentential context. The relation between a sentence and the context is frequently reckoned to be in some sense ¨syntax-free¨, in that it is not syntactically represented but introduced post-syntactically by semantic rules of interpretation. Alessandra Giorgi develops a different perspective through an empirically grounded exploration of temporal indexicality: she argues that the speaker's temporal location is specified in the syntactic structure. She supports her analysis with theoretical and empirical arguments based on data mainly from English and Italian but also considering Chinese and Romanian. Professor Giorgi addresses some difficult and longstanding issues in the analysis of temporal phenomena - including the Italian imperfect indicative, the properties of the so-called future-in-the-past, and the properties of Free Indirect Discourse. She shows that her framework can account elegantly for all of them. Carefully argued, succinct, and clearly written her book will appeal widely to syntacticians and semanticists from graduate level upwards and to linguists interested in the syntax-semantics interface. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction 1: The speaker's projection 2: Can we ever see the speaker's coordinates in the C-layer? 3: Is the speaker there? An analysis of some anomalous contexts 4: Depending on the future: the speaker changes her perspective 5: When somebody else is speaking: Free Indirect Discourse Concluding Remarks References Index ...

Product details

• Authors: Alessandra Giorgi, Alessandra (Professor of Linguistics Giorgi, Giorgi Alessandra
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 15.02.2010
• EAN: 9780199571901
• ISBN: 978-0-19-957190-1
• No. of pages: 256
• Series: Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics; Oxford Linguistics; Oxford Studies in Theoretical; Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics No. 28; Oxford Linguistics; Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics; Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics No. 28
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative linguistics; Philosophy of Language, PHILOSOPHY / Language, LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Semantics, Semantics, discourse analysis, stylistics, Semantics, discourse analysis, etc