A Typology of Reference Systems

Abstract

AbstractThe term ‘reference system’ designates all functions within the grammatical system of a given language that indicate whether the addressee(s) should identify the referents of participants in the proposition and, if so, how they should identify the referents. Reference systems are a part of the semantic structure encoded in the grammatical system, and the study of reference systems contributes to the description of the semantic structure of individual languages. The present book offers a non-aprioristic typology of reference systems of typologically or genetically distinct languages including English, Mandarin, non-literate Russian, Polish, six Chadic languages spoken in Cameroon, Nigeria, and Chad, and a dozen Sino-Russian idiolect spoken in the far east of Russia for which no genetic relationship can be established. The analyses identify major functional domains, subdomains, and individual functions which enable the identification of participants in a proposition in individual languages. The book identifies the most frequent and least frequent functions that instruct the speakers whether to identify the participants and if so how to identify the participants in the propositions. The book demonstrates that bare nouns, pronouns, demonstratives, and determiners, coding on the verb (‘agreement’), have different functions in different languages. The book offers explanations for these differences. The book draws some implications of the reference systems for the theory and methodology of semantic analysis, for linguistic typology, and for syntactic theories.