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BY 4.0 license Open Access Published by De Gruyter Open Access May 22, 2019

Verbal Symbols and Demonstrations Across Modalities

  • Gillian Ramchand EMAIL logo
From the journal Open Linguistics

Abstract

In this paper, I develop a new theory of the ingredients of semantic composition for the verb phrase, building on work in Ramchand (2018). I argue that the essential properties of this new approach make possible a new rapprochement between the theoretical analyses of symbolic verbal meaning across the visual and auditory modalities. The innovation of the new theory is that it partitions the verb phrase into a lower purely symbolic zone and a higher instantiational situation zone, mediated by the demonstrative act (cf. Davidson 2015, Henderson 2016). In the first part of the paper, I lay out the system, and then I show how it can be used to give a formal analysis of gestural and iconic elements in language. Along the way, I discuss the different ways in which iconicity in the two modalities plays out.

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Received: 2018-08-17
Accepted: 2019-03-01
Published Online: 2019-05-22

© 2019 Gillian Ramchand, published by De Gruyter Open

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Public License.

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