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Focus–cleft merger: Difference between revisions
→A technical aside owing to bï’s semantics: add tl;dr
(Created page with "This {{proposal}}, which may colloquially be termed the {{class|kü}} proposal, wishes to merge two features of the language: * Focus markers, which attach to words or phrases and which express a relation of the marked material with respect to the rest of the clause – e.g., {{t|kú}} highlights information that the listener should consider as new and important, {{t|tó}} states it is only this choice of value that satisfies the clause, etc. For instance, {{t|Chuq j...") |
(→A technical aside owing to bï’s semantics: add tl;dr) Tags: Mobile edit Mobile web edit Advanced mobile edit |
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====A technical aside owing to {{t|bï}}’s semantics==== | ====A technical aside owing to {{t|bï}}’s semantics==== | ||
: tl;dr: Officially, {{t|bï}} should only take definite references. I posit that this means that {{t|bï}}’s topic must be reducible to something like λ𝑥′. 𝑥′ = 𝑥 for some predetermined 𝑥 : e. The section aims to expand this notion to all plausible topic phrase types if {{t|bí}} is to be expected to make any sense. | |||
{{t|bï}} is restricted to definite references – cross-linguistically, topic phrases cannot include an indefinite referent (‘as for some crocheting’ only makes sense if we read ‘some’ as {{t|ké}}; as {{t|sá}} it is infelicitous). For this reason, we need to set down a definition of what it means for a noun phrase (and any other kind of phrase, given that {{t|bí}} would be allowed to attach to anything that {{class|kú}} can) to be “definite”. For this reason, we must stipulate that determiners which always denote a unique maximal reference, like {{t|ké}}, exophoric {{done|2}}, or experimental {{t|cúaq}} – are definite, but then outer quantification may be flaky: | {{t|bï}} is restricted to definite references – cross-linguistically, topic phrases cannot include an indefinite referent (‘as for some crocheting’ only makes sense if we read ‘some’ as {{t|ké}}; as {{t|sá}} it is infelicitous). For this reason, we need to set down a definition of what it means for a noun phrase (and any other kind of phrase, given that {{t|bí}} would be allowed to attach to anything that {{class|kú}} can) to be “definite”. For this reason, we must stipulate that determiners which always denote a unique maximal reference, like {{t|ké}}, exophoric {{done|2}}, or experimental {{t|cúaq}} – are definite, but then outer quantification may be flaky: | ||