The convergent evolution of radial constructions: French and English deictics and existentials

Cognitive Linguistics 16 (1):1-42 (2005)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

English deictic and existential there-constructions have been analyzed as constituting a single radial category of form—meaning pairings, related through motivated links, such as metaphor (Lakoff 1987). By comparison, existentials and deictic demonstratives in French make use of two distinct radial categories. The current study analyzes the varied senses of French deictic demonstratives (voilà ‘there is’ and voici ‘here is’) and the existential (il y a ‘there is’). We argue that the syntactic behavior of each of their senses is best explained by the semantic and pragmatic function of that sense, in combination with constraints imposed by its relation to other senses. A cross-linguistic comparison of the deictic demonstrative and existential constructions in French and English supports this claim: despite the different historical origins of these forms in the two languages, they display a strikingly similar array of uses and formal constraints. The parallel evolution of deictics and existentials in these two languages is interpreted as a case of convergent evolution of linguistic items, much like convergent evolution in biological species.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 103,388

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2016-06-30

Downloads
27 (#864,536)

6 months
4 (#864,415)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Mental spaces: aspects of meaning construction in natural language.Gilles Fauconnier - 1994 - New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.

Add more references