Paul Hopper
Emeritus Professor (Paul Mellon Chair of Humanities) Carnegie Mellon University; Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation (1985); Hermann and Clara Collitz Professor of Linguistics, Linguistic Society of America Linguistics Institute (UCLA 1983); Directeur d'Études, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Sorbonne (2001); Medal of the Collège de France (2001); Senior Fellow, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Freiburg. Fields of study: Indo-European and Germanic linguistics; Discourse; Malay-Indonesian linguistics; linguistic theory.
Address: Department of English
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh PA 15213
Address: Department of English
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh PA 15213
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Papers by Paul Hopper
Discourse studies of demonstratives have generally focused on their roles as tracking devices or, more recently, as organizers of social space. In this paper I develop a dialogical approach to the English demonstratives this/these and that/those. I argue that the interactional uses of the English demonstratives derive from their recipient designed functions of PROJECTING (in the case of this/these) and RETRACTING (in the case of that/those) future and past segments of discourse. Discourse that projects is FOREGROUNDED, while discourse that retracts is BACKGROUNDED. I suggest that backgrounding as analyzed here can be characterized as OBVIATIVE, a term known from general linguistics. From the two perspectives described, a number of secondary functions such as the well-known deictic uses of proximal and distal deixis can be derived.
Discourse studies of demonstratives have generally focused on their roles as tracking devices or, more recently, as organizers of social space. In this paper I develop a dialogical approach to the English demonstratives this/these and that/those. I argue that the interactional uses of the English demonstratives derive from their recipient designed functions of PROJECTING (in the case of this/these) and RETRACTING (in the case of that/those) future and past segments of discourse. Discourse that projects is FOREGROUNDED, while discourse that retracts is BACKGROUNDED. I suggest that backgrounding as analyzed here can be characterized as OBVIATIVE, a term known from general linguistics. From the two perspectives described, a number of secondary functions such as the well-known deictic uses of proximal and distal deixis can be derived.