Similarity demonstratives

Abstract

Similarity demonstratives are a particular class of demonstratives found across languages, e.g., German so, English such, Polish tak and Turkish boyle. These demonstratives occur as modifiers of nominal and/or verbal and adjectival phrases posing the problem of how to reconcile their demonstrative characteristics with their modifying capacity. It is hypothesized in this paper that they express similarity to instead of identity with the target of the demonstration gesture thereby generating ad-hoc kinds. The paper focuses on the interpretation of ad-nominal and ad-adjectival occurrences of German so. An analysis is presented combining truth-conditional semantics with multidimensional attribute spaces with the help of a generalization-of adjectival measure functions. Similarity is defined in such spaces as indistinguishability with respect to a given set of relevant dimensions. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.