The unitary procedural semantics of the, this and that

Abstract

While THE vs THIS and THAT are treated in different places in contemporary grammars, it is well-known that the three lexemes have common ancestry in the demonstrative paradigms of Old English. In this article I intend to show that the traditional approach to the analysis of THE vs THIS and THAT as belonging to different syntactic types misses a crucial level of unitary analysis where semantics is integrated in pragmatic procedures. I argue that THE, THIS and THAT share a pan-Uermamc þ- morpheme, whose semantics is motivated and constrained by the architecture of the cognitive processing of ostensive stimuli. If we adopt the analysis proposed, we can achieve a higher degree of correlation between morphological form, syntactic distribution, semantic content and pragmatic function. The analysis also shows that pragmatic procedures may be coded in semantics, thus integrating the two levels of meaning.