The relevance of referring expressions: the case of diary drop in English

Abstract

2 I, Katherine J. Scott confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 3 This thesis offers a pragmatic analysis of subjectless sentences in non-null subject languages, focusing on English ‘diary drop ’ (as in ‘Saw a good film yesterday’). In chapter 1, I survey the data and discuss existing syntactic analyses (Haegeman & Ihsane 1999, 2001). While these generally acknowledge the importance of pragmatic factors in an overall account, no detailed investigation of their contribution has been proposed. In chapter 2, I consider subjectless sentences in child language, and suggest that relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/95) can shed light on why such utterances occur. In chapter 3, I revisit the adult data, and having established that null subjects function as referring expressions, I consider two pragmatically-oriented approaches to

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