Karl Buhler (1879-1963) was one of the leading theoreticians of language of this century. His masterwork Sprachtheorie (1934) has been praised widely and gained considerable recognition in the fields of linguistics, semiotics, the philosophy of language and the psychology of language. The work has, however, resisted translation into English partly because of its spirited and vivid style, partly because of the depth and range of analysis, partly because of the great erudition of the author, who displays a thorough command of both the linguistic and the philosophical traditions. With this translation, Buhler's ideas on many problems that are still controversial and others only recently rediscovered, are now accessible to the English-speaking world.Contents: The work is divided into four parts. Part I discusses the four “axioms” or principles of language research, the most famous of which is the first, the “organon model”, the base of Buhler's instrumental view of language. Part II treats the role of indexicality in language and discusses deixis as one determinant of speech. Part III examines the symbolic field, dealing with context, onomatopoeia and the function of case. Part IV deals with the elements of language and their organization (syllabification, the definition of the word, metaphor, anaphora, etc).The text is accompanied by: Translator's preface; Introduction (by Achim Eschbach); Glossary of terms and Bibliography of cited works (both compiled by the translator); Index of names, Index of topics.

KARL BUHLER: THEORY OF LANGUAGE: The representational function of language

Three experiments examined the hypothesis that the demonstrative noun phrase (NP) that N, as an anadeictic expression, preferentially refers to the less salient referent in a discourse representation when used anaphorically, whereas the anaphoric pronoun he or she preferentially refers to the highly-focused referent. The findings, from a sentence completion task and two reading time experiments that used gender to create ambiguous and unambiguous coreference, reveal that the demonstrative NP specifically orients processing toward a less salient referent when there is no gender cue discriminating between different possible referents. These findings show the importance of taking into account the discourse function of the anaphor itself and its influence on the process of searching for the referent.

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Between anaphora and deixis … The resolution of the demonstrative noun phrase “that N”

10. Towards a unified model of domain-bound reference

3. Identification: REFERENCE as semantic choice

This paper takes as its starting point the ground-breaking claims of Sir John Lyons in his work on deixis and anaphora in the 1970s and early 1980s, developing the pioneering work of Karl Buhler: in particular, the basic insight that deixis is the source of reference. Flowing from this are the claims that anaphora is derivative upon deixis, and that there is an intimate relationship holding within the world's languages between modality and deixis. Lyons's hypothesis is that this asymetrical, "oriented" relation between deixis and anaphora is apparent in the very functioning of discourse in context: for while anaphora serves to refer back to the intensional correlates of entities already present within a given "universe of discourse", deixis is one (central) means of actually entering these discourse representations into such a universe. Taking inspiration from Lyons's conception, deixis and anaphora are conceived here as procedures for coordinating the speech participants' attention throughout the flow of text as produced within a given context to which they are party. These indexical referring procedures are by no means mutually exclusive: indeed, indexical reference is an inherently "scalar" phenomenon; for the continuous nature of the relation between strict deixis and strict anaphora, passing through "anadeixis" (a hybrid procedure type partaking of both these context-bound referring procedures) as an intermediate phase, reflects the priority of deixis over anaphora, which presupposes it both ontogenetically and phylogenetically. 'Strict' anadeictic and discourse-deictic uses both involve reference via the discourse context upstream of the occurrence of a given demonstrative expression; but while the 'strict' anadeictic function consists in simply retrieving a referent already present within a representation of the previous discourse by "pointing" toward it indexically, the discourse-deictic one requires the addressee or reader to operate upon a relevant contextual discourse representation in order to create a referent which was not present as such initially. Anadeictically-functioning demonstrative NPs may perform a discourse-structuring function, by heralding a transition between major discourse units within a given text. They realise this by shifting a hitherto individual-level reference from a macro-topical entity to a more generic class of referents that includes the one(s) in focus up to this point. It is the deictic property of demonstratives, coded morphologically via their proximal vs. distal character, along with the nature of the predicative component of the expression where it is a lexical NP (which as such may not correspond to presupposed information, but rather to a (re-)classifying or implictly-predicating function) which enable such expression types to perform the discourse-structuring roles at issue here.

https://hal-univ-tlse2.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00960772/document

Francis Cornish

Papers

Indexicality by degrees