Strong indefinites in Turkish, referential persistence, and salience structure
Umut Özge, Duygu Özge, Klaus von Heusinger · 2016
Inde nite noun phrases come in di erent varieties: strong inde nites, regularinde nites and weak inde nites (Kamp 2014). In this paper we focus on stronginde nites, i.e. inde nites that come with a referential intention of the speakerand that show various e ects at three semantic and pragmatic levels: (i) at thesentence level, for instance, strong inde nites tend to be directly referential andspeci c, they show wide scope behaviour and escape scope islands; (ii) theirbackward-looking discourse properties include discourse-linking and presup-positional behaviour; (iii) with respect to the upcoming discourse they introducesalient discourse referents that can be picked up by attenuated anaphoric expres-sion and they signal that the introduced discourse referent will be the antecedentfor extended referential and even topical chains. While the sentence-semanticproperties of strong inde nites are fairly well understood, their backward- andforward-looking properties are still unclear and need further research. Our studyaims at investigating their forward-looking properties.Languages may provide lexical, morphological or syntactic means to markstrong inde nites. We assume that case marking of the inde nite direct object (Dif-ferential Object Marking or DOM) in Turkish indicates a strong inde nite. Case-marked inde nite direct objects constitute one prototype of speci c inde nites(Enç 1991) or strong inde nites in our terminology. We employ Turkish strong in-de nites as our empirical domain to investigate the forward-looking discourseproperties of strong inde nites. The two properties we are presently interestedin are (i) the referential persistence of the referent introduced by the inde nite,which is measured in the frequency of anaphoric references back to this referent;