Goddard, Cliff, & Wierzbicka, Anna (2008). New semantic primes and new syntactic frames: “Specificational BE” and “abstract THIS/IT”. In Cliff Goddard (Ed.), Cross-linguistic semantics (pp. 35-57). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.102.06god
In section 1, we propose a “new” semantic prime — specificational BE — and show how it can be used to analyse some classic problems in the semantics of naming and reference. In section 2, we explore a newly recognised syntactic option of the prime THIS, here termed “abstract THIS/IT”. Both the new possibilities are involved in the semantics of specificational and focus constructions of English. These are the topic of section 3.
