Presentative (linguistics)
A presentative, or presentational,[1] is a word or a syntactic structure which presents, or introduces, an entity, bringing it to the attention of the addressee. Typically, the entity thus introduced will serve as the topic of the subsequent discourse. For example, the construction with "there" in the following English sentence is a presentative:
There appeared a cat on the window sill.
In French, one of major uses of the words voici and voilà is presentative, as in the following example:
However, the most common presentative in French is the (il) y a formula (from verb avoir ‘have’), as in the following sentence:
Similarly to French il y a, in Chinese the existential verb yǒu (have) is often used as a presentative to introduce new entities into discourse:
Kàn!
Look
Yǒu
PRESTT
rén
people
tōu
steal
nǐde
your
miànbāo!.
bread.
' Look! There’s someone [who] stole your bread!.' [4]
In Maybrat, a likely language isolate of West Papua, there is a dedicated presentative prefix me- which combines with demonstratives. It contrasts with other prefixes like pe- (forming adverbs, "there") or re- and we- (for attributives, "this man"). This contrast is illustrated in the following three examples with the demonstrative -to, which is used for non-masculine referents close to the speaker:[5]
Special word order configurations can also be used to introduce foregrounded entities into discourse, that is, to realise a presentational function. This is the case of “inverted” sentences, where the subject of SV(O) languages appears in post-verbal position. In the following spoken Chinese sentence, the agent of the motion verb lái (come), which usually occupies the preverbal position, occurs after the verb because it denotes a discourse-new entity:
Nèi
That
tiān
day
túránjiān
suddenly
ne,
PAUS
lái-le
come-PFV
hǎoxiē-ge
quite.a.few-CL
fēijī.
airplane.
Lit: ' Suddenly that day, came quite a few airplanes.' [9]
A subtype of inverted sentence is called locative inversion since in many languages the preverbal position is filled with a locative expression. English (especially written English) has this kind of structure:
In a little white house lived two rabbits.[10]
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.[11]
References
[edit]- ^ Matthews, P. H. (2014). "presentational". The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-967512-8.
- ^ Porhiel, Sylvie (2012). "The presentative voici/voilà – Towards a pragmatic definition". Journal of Pragmatics. 44 (4): 435–452. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2012.01.001. ISSN 0378-2166.
- ^ Lena, Ludovica (2020). "Referent introducing strategies in advanced L2 usage: a bi-directional study on French learners of Chinese and Chinese learners of French". In Ryan J., Crostwaite P. (ed.). Referring in a Second Language. Studies on Reference to Person in a Multilingual World. Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780429263972-9. ISBN 978-0-429-2639-72. S2CID 216254718.
- ^ Lena 2020, p. 178, ex. 2.
- ^ Dol, Philomena Hedwig (2007). A grammar of Maybrat : a language of the Bird's Head Peninsula, Papua province, Indonesia. Pacific Linguistics. Canberra: Australian National University. pp. 103–4. ISBN 978-0-85883-573-3. The glosses here have been simplified.
- ^ Dol 2007, p. 103, ex. 230.
- ^ Dol 2007, p. 99, ex. 208b.
- ^ Dol 2007, p. 99, ex. 206a.
- ^ Lena 2020, ex. 21.
- ^ Birner, Betty Jean (1994). "Information status and word order: an analysis of English inversion". Language. 2 (70): 233–259. doi:10.2307/415828. JSTOR 415828.
- ^ Tolkien, J. R. R. The Hobbit, or There and Back Again.