Pragmatic determinants of syntactic subject in English

This paper investigates experimentally the extent to which global theme, local theme, and previous theme control the speaker's selection of syntactic subject in English. Two groups of forty English native speakers each are asked to tell a story in accordance with a given title, while looking at...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of pragmatics Vol. 25; no. 6; pp. 839 - 854
Main Author Kim, Myung-Hee
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.06.1996
Elsevier
North-Holland Pub. Co
Subjects
English
Linguistics
Mathematics and linguistics
Pragmatics
Quantitative studies
Subject
Topics
Theme
Experimental study
Mathematical linguistics
Narration
Pragmatics
Grammatical subject
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Summary:This paper investigates experimentally the extent to which global theme, local theme, and previous theme control the speaker's selection of syntactic subject in English. Two groups of forty English native speakers each are asked to tell a story in accordance with a given title, while looking at a set of pictures. The titles and pictures are manipulated in such a way that one of the two characters of the story is perceived more salient. Applying logit analysis to the results shows that all three factors significantly affect subject assignment in English. It is also shown that local theme is the most powerful and consistent factor in explaining syntactic subject.
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ISSN:0378-2166
1879-1387
DOI:10.1016/0378-2166(95)00018-6