It girl, it bag et le pronom it : le sens du pronom neutre non anaphorique
This paper follows recent cognitive approaches such as that of Langacker (2009) in trying to define a systematic meaning for the pronoun it. The formalist view, according to which the pronoun does not have any real meaning in extraposed structures, for example, fails to take into account the context...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires du Midi
2012-11-01
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| Series: | Anglophonia |
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| Online Access: | http://journals.openedition.org/anglophonia/151 |
| Summary: | This paper follows recent cognitive approaches such as that of Langacker (2009) in trying to define a systematic meaning for the pronoun it. The formalist view, according to which the pronoun does not have any real meaning in extraposed structures, for example, fails to take into account the context in which some of these structures appear. The recent lexicalization of the pronoun as an adjective or a noun in phrases such as ‘she’s an it girl’ and ‘she’s it’ helps me identify the recurrent semantic feature of the pronoun: the cognitive obviousness of its referent for an implicit speaker, resulting in a strictly contextual identifiability of this referent. Phenomenological and cognitive factors are implied in this new use of the neutral pronoun.‘Neutral’ has to be understood as ‘inclusive’ and ‘impersonal’ as making the speaker ‘implicit’. |
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| ISSN: | 1278-3331 2427-0466 |