The aim of this paper is to outline that the notions of thetic versus categorical sentences are characteristic of a long tradition of philosophy, especially of the philosophy of Realism. Characteristic of Realism is a highly developed theory of the copula. Sentences consist of a subject, a rather abstract copula, and a predicate. Thus, the structure of any sentence and of any judgment is conceived as being triadic in nature. The copula appears – overtly or covertly – in synthetic sentences as well as in analytic sentences, both of which are categorical sentences (Roger Bacon 1240/2009: 70), whereby the analytic copula differs from the synthetic copula with respect to the mode of signifying reality. It will be evidenced that the function of analytic sentences is to build up a shared system of knowledge (mental lexicon), whereas synthetic sentences represent a technique to socialize individual experiences. According to the philosophy of Realism, the copula appears even in thetic sentences. Sentences without a copula are meant to be inconceivable. The working hypothesis is that in contrast to categorical sentences, thetic sentences are not triadic, but dyadic in structure. According to the Realist philosopher Lotze, thetic sentences consist of a copula and an amalgam of linguistically unstructured impressions, compressed in the predicate. In line with the philosophy of Realism, thetic sentences are conceived as some premature stage in the evolution of language. Thus, thetic sentences represent an embryonic stage of a categorical sentence as well as of thought (Lotze 1874/1989: 70–74). Thetic sentences are able to imitate the structure of categorical sentences (pseudo-subject – copula – pseudo-predicate). The conclusion is that thetic sentences are pseudo-structured “intransitive” judgments. They consist of a copula and one single chunk of “intransitive experience” only.
This article examines whether theticity and sentence-focus can be considered to be encoded grammatical categories of Dutch. After providing some background about theticity and sentence-focus, the concept ‘encoded grammatical category’ is operationalized along the lines of Integral Linguistics or Coserian Structural Functionalism. In order for a functional category to qualify as an encoded grammatical category of a language, the language should have at least one construction that encodes the category as a non-defeasible semantic property. The article provides a qualitative investigation of both corpus-based and constructed examples of five Dutch constructions that have hitherto been recognized in the literature as thetic or sentence-focus constructions. It is shown that none of the previously identified Dutch thetic and sentence-focus constructions grammatically encode theticity and sentence-focus as their non-defeasible semantics. All Dutch constructions have uses that are categorically opposed to the categories theticity and sentence-focus. Theticity and sentence-focus are therefore no independently encoded grammatical categories of Dutch, but rather categories of discourse and (normal) language use.
This paper investigates constructions in Norwegian and German with an expletive pronoun in subject position, and for Norwegian also in object position. The discussion covers presentational, impersonal and extrapositional constructions in both languages, and in Norwegian also the ‘light reflexive’ seg in its interaction with presentationals. We relate the discussion to a parameter of theticity, whereby sentences with an expletive subject will count as thetic while sentences with a content-full NP subject will count as categorical. Also sentences with expletive object are argued to have a thetic value. Categorical sentences on their side are ranked according to a parameter of transitivity, accounting for constraints on presentational constructions in Norwegian, and seen as constituting an opposite dimension of constructional values to that of theticity.
The paper describes the basic types of independent clauses in the Tanti dialect of Dargwa (Nakh-Dagestanian (= East Caucasian), Russian Federation). Most independent clauses in Tanti are headed either by the identificational copula or a finite verb form. Less frequently, we meet sentences headed by one of the four existential copulas. There are also some independent clauses headed by a non-finite verb form or a non-verbal predicate and containing no copula. The paper shows that the basic difference between the sentences with different copula types and without any copulas is the type of information structure of the relevant sentence. The identificational copula is a feature of categorical sentences; the position of the copula points at the focused constituent. The existential copulas tend to head thetic structures. Copula-less converbal clauses are often interpreted as mirative sentences, which can also be analyzed as thetic, but differ from the existential structures by the moment when the speaker obtains the knowledge of the situation.
In this research, I examine the correlation of coherent/incoherent constructions with thetic/categorical judgments in modern German, based on ideas put forward by Isaka (2020). Coherence/incoherence is a syntactic distinction first studied extensively by Bech (1983), while theticity/categoricality is a semantic distinction discussed by Marty (1918). An analysis of authentic data of the verb wagen ‘dare’ with subject keiner ‘no one’ and er ‘he’ reveals that incoherent constructions are less preferred for the purpose of expressing thetic judgments with keiner ‘no one’. In this avoidance of incoherence for theticity, there is a correspondence of form with content. To express a thetic judgment, which is also called simple judgment because of its indivisibility, incoherent constructions, consisting of two clauses, seem to be less suitable.
In this paper, it will be discussed how, in both German and Chinese, strong and weak reference in thetic and categorical sentences are expressed if held against Carlson’s (1977) semantic event types of stage-level/SL- and individual-level/IL-predicates. This article will put emphasis on correspondents of indefinite and bare nouns in German on personal pronouns, the construction zhè/nà (this/that) (+Num)+CL(assifier)+N or the repetition of DP, which can only express the strong reference of the subject. The problems arise from the fact that Chinese, in contrast to German, signals reference strength not by articles as there are no articles in Chinese. In order to come to a comparison, we will use the Carlsonian reference option as a criterion.
The article is structured as follows: Section 1 introduces the definition of the strong and weak nominal reference. The second section will discuss thetic and categoric constructions in German and Chinese. The third section deals with the interplay of SL- and IL-predicates, thetic/categorical sentences, and the nominal reference of subjects, whereby the SL- and the IL-predicate are each described in a separate section. Section 4 concludes this paper with a summary of the results obtained in the previous sections.
The German psych-adjectives glücklich (happy) and traurig (sad) and their Japanese counterparts shiawase and kanashii are considered here with regard to their semantics, the hierarchy of thematic roles, and the mode of expression. The attributive usage has a semantic structure with broad focus on the entire structure, which shows a similarity to thetic judgments despite its nonpropositional status. By contrast, the predicative usage with the subject/topic as the stimulus denotes a permanent property of the entity evoking the emotion and consists of two components respectively with narrow focus, which corresponds to the double judgment of categoricals. This structure is possible owing to the property of the copulative predication that it gives the sentence definiteness, but does not give any semantic role to the arguments.
This chapter examines theticity in intransitive sentences. Starting with the assumption that the function of a thetic sentence is to introduce a referent into a discourse (without predicating anything of it), two requirements are proposed to characterize thetic intransitives: (A) the sole argument of the sentence must be vP-internal; and (B) the sole argument must be interpreted as a property. Both requirements have precedents in previous work: (A) incorporates Guéron’s (1980) observations on what she called the Presentation LF; and (B) builds on McNally’s (1998a) work on the semantics and discourse function of existential sentences. These requirements show that theticity cannot be explained by lexical verb or verb class; what matters for theticity is syntactic structure and semantic interpretation. It is then shown that the thetic/categorical distinction cuts across a commonly-accepted distinction in intransitive sentences, the unergative-unaccusative distinction. Specifically, only a subtype of unaccusative sentence, those with the “existential unaccusative” structure (Irwin 2018a), satisfies (A) and (B). By contrast, change-of-state unaccusatives pattern with unergative sentences in not being thetic.
How are the logical terms of thetic and categorical judgments to be distinguished linguistically? The key questions are how judgments can be thought of in terms of linguistics and what the deeper lying reason is for distinguishing the two notions. In our search for an answer, we can be guided by the distinction in Japanese, i.e. through the use of the particle ga for thetics and wa for categoricals. In German, the German equivalents are marked by accent mark and information structural word order. Syntactically, thetics are represented by VP incorporation of all arguments including the subject. The arguments are not subject to syntactic probing mechanisms but follow semantic preference principles. The following sectionss lead the reader through the paper. (1) What is thetic, what is categorical? What is this difference for? (2) Main working hypothesis: From thetic judgment to thetic sentence. (3) Hypothetic definition 1: the thetic sentence in German. (4) Hypothetic definition 2: Thetic – Categorical. (5) Thetics are presentational, not locative and not existential. (6) Accent and information structure. (7) Common ground contents (speech act felicity conditions). (8) Integrational focus: broad and narrow focus (Jacobs 2001). (9) VP-integrated subject ≠ Unaccusative subject. (10) Speaker deixis implied by subject inversion. (11) Special ga-subjects after Onoe 1973: The deeper key to thetics? (12) Linking thetic syntax with Onoe’s special ga-verb class in Japanese? (13) The origo decision for episodicity and genericity. (14) Typological commonalities. (15) Hypothesis: Passives are near-thetic. (16) Conclusion without a real end: the interface mix. (17) Outgoing: leading ideas and main concepts.
According to Marty (1918), thetic statements differ from categorical ones in making a simple existential recognition or rejection rather than a predication. In Japanese, where two subject particles, ga and wa, are presumably available for this differentiation (Kuroda 1972), the point can be expounded especially by the fact that da ‘to be’ hardly appears as an existential verb in ga-marked, but only in wa-marked sentences. Moreover, the same holds true for German optatives. I conclude from these observations that thetic statements find their expression not only pseudocategorically, as originally assumed by Marty (1918), but also in a purely thetic manner in natural languages, provided (at least) there is no personal deictic agreement at work between a syntactic subject and a syntactic predicate.
The distinction between thetics and categoricals in natural language has been observed in more and more languages recently. The theoretical discussion about the thetic/categorical distinction has also become increasingly relevant. This article presents a few challenges to an assertion/judgment-based analysis of the thetic/categorical distinction and offers instead an analysis based on common ground update within a theory of alternative semantics. In this approach, I follow Murray (2009, 2010, 2014) and Roberts (2012) that each sentence offers different kinds of update to the common ground based on the question(s) under discussion (or at-issue/not-at-issue content). I suggest that thetics present a unique type of update which explains why sentences such as It is raining, prosodically inflected sentences (known as those with sentence focus), existentials, and presentatives have been called thetics. Each statement contributes to (or updates) the information interlocutors use, and this common ground shapes the assertions they make. I ultimately propose that the thetic/categorical distinction may no longer be helpful for a description of natural language. Instead, these phenomena can be situated within the increasingly robust frameworks which bridge the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interfaces. Finally, I apply this proposal to a construction type in Biblical Hebrew which I previously labelled a thetic construction in Wilson (2017, 2019).
This study investigates the linguistic subject in categorical and thetic sentences. In the “subjectless” thetic sentence, as Kuroda (1972) pointed out, we have a nonprototypical subject, a B-grade subject, which is preferably combined in Japanese with the nominative marker ga. By contrasting B-grade subjects in Japanese with their corresponding expressions in German (and other languages), we discover two types of subjects, internal and external. In Japanese, B-grade subjects are realizations of internal subjects, which are verbalized differently in other languages as a subject, as a dummy subject, or an object. Comparing different realization forms of weather expressions crosslinguistically, we suggest that the language-specific realizations of B-grade subjects correspond to three types of thetic judgments: entity-central, event-central, and mixed type of both.
This paper aims to explain the relationship between thetic statements and two groups of particles, i.e. Japanese sentence-final particles (sfps) and German modal particles (mps). Thetic statements are generally associated with predicates of temporary states, verbs of existence or verbs of appearance. By examining the properties of predicates in thetic statements, I argue that perception description is a key characteristic for theticity. I propose a common representational framework (Pragmatic Function Representation; PFR) and a distributional map (Spectrum for Persons Involved and Reference Points; SfPI&RP) to capture commonalities and differences of sfps and mps. What is common in the use of sfps and mps is that they both can contribute to form a speech act directed to addressees (report), so that the sentences thus formed are non-thetic. Most sfps contribute to convert private expressions into public ones, which is not the case in German mps.
The aim of this paper is to outline that the notions of thetic versus categorical sentences are characteristic of a long tradition of philosophy, especially of the philosophy of Realism. Characteristic of Realism is a highly developed theory of the copula. Sentences consist of a subject, a rather abstract copula, and a predicate. Thus, the structure of any sentence and of any judgment is conceived as being triadic in nature. The copula appears – overtly or covertly – in synthetic sentences as well as in analytic sentences, both of which are categorical sentences (Roger Bacon 1240/2009: 70), whereby the analytic copula differs from the synthetic copula with respect to the mode of signifying reality. It will be evidenced that the function of analytic sentences is to build up a shared system of knowledge (mental lexicon), whereas synthetic sentences represent a technique to socialize individual experiences. According to the philosophy of Realism, the copula appears even in thetic sentences. Sentences without a copula are meant to be inconceivable. The working hypothesis is that in contrast to categorical sentences, thetic sentences are not triadic, but dyadic in structure. According to the Realist philosopher Lotze, thetic sentences consist of a copula and an amalgam of linguistically unstructured impressions, compressed in the predicate. In line with the philosophy of Realism, thetic sentences are conceived as some premature stage in the evolution of language. Thus, thetic sentences represent an embryonic stage of a categorical sentence as well as of thought (Lotze 1874/1989: 70–74). Thetic sentences are able to imitate the structure of categorical sentences (pseudo-subject – copula – pseudo-predicate). The conclusion is that thetic sentences are pseudo-structured “intransitive” judgments. They consist of a copula and one single chunk of “intransitive experience” only.
This article examines whether theticity and sentence-focus can be considered to be encoded grammatical categories of Dutch. After providing some background about theticity and sentence-focus, the concept ‘encoded grammatical category’ is operationalized along the lines of Integral Linguistics or Coserian Structural Functionalism. In order for a functional category to qualify as an encoded grammatical category of a language, the language should have at least one construction that encodes the category as a non-defeasible semantic property. The article provides a qualitative investigation of both corpus-based and constructed examples of five Dutch constructions that have hitherto been recognized in the literature as thetic or sentence-focus constructions. It is shown that none of the previously identified Dutch thetic and sentence-focus constructions grammatically encode theticity and sentence-focus as their non-defeasible semantics. All Dutch constructions have uses that are categorically opposed to the categories theticity and sentence-focus. Theticity and sentence-focus are therefore no independently encoded grammatical categories of Dutch, but rather categories of discourse and (normal) language use.
This paper investigates constructions in Norwegian and German with an expletive pronoun in subject position, and for Norwegian also in object position. The discussion covers presentational, impersonal and extrapositional constructions in both languages, and in Norwegian also the ‘light reflexive’ seg in its interaction with presentationals. We relate the discussion to a parameter of theticity, whereby sentences with an expletive subject will count as thetic while sentences with a content-full NP subject will count as categorical. Also sentences with expletive object are argued to have a thetic value. Categorical sentences on their side are ranked according to a parameter of transitivity, accounting for constraints on presentational constructions in Norwegian, and seen as constituting an opposite dimension of constructional values to that of theticity.
The paper describes the basic types of independent clauses in the Tanti dialect of Dargwa (Nakh-Dagestanian (= East Caucasian), Russian Federation). Most independent clauses in Tanti are headed either by the identificational copula or a finite verb form. Less frequently, we meet sentences headed by one of the four existential copulas. There are also some independent clauses headed by a non-finite verb form or a non-verbal predicate and containing no copula. The paper shows that the basic difference between the sentences with different copula types and without any copulas is the type of information structure of the relevant sentence. The identificational copula is a feature of categorical sentences; the position of the copula points at the focused constituent. The existential copulas tend to head thetic structures. Copula-less converbal clauses are often interpreted as mirative sentences, which can also be analyzed as thetic, but differ from the existential structures by the moment when the speaker obtains the knowledge of the situation.
In this research, I examine the correlation of coherent/incoherent constructions with thetic/categorical judgments in modern German, based on ideas put forward by Isaka (2020). Coherence/incoherence is a syntactic distinction first studied extensively by Bech (1983), while theticity/categoricality is a semantic distinction discussed by Marty (1918). An analysis of authentic data of the verb wagen ‘dare’ with subject keiner ‘no one’ and er ‘he’ reveals that incoherent constructions are less preferred for the purpose of expressing thetic judgments with keiner ‘no one’. In this avoidance of incoherence for theticity, there is a correspondence of form with content. To express a thetic judgment, which is also called simple judgment because of its indivisibility, incoherent constructions, consisting of two clauses, seem to be less suitable.
In this paper, it will be discussed how, in both German and Chinese, strong and weak reference in thetic and categorical sentences are expressed if held against Carlson’s (1977) semantic event types of stage-level/SL- and individual-level/IL-predicates. This article will put emphasis on correspondents of indefinite and bare nouns in German on personal pronouns, the construction zhè/nà (this/that) (+Num)+CL(assifier)+N or the repetition of DP, which can only express the strong reference of the subject. The problems arise from the fact that Chinese, in contrast to German, signals reference strength not by articles as there are no articles in Chinese. In order to come to a comparison, we will use the Carlsonian reference option as a criterion.
The article is structured as follows: Section 1 introduces the definition of the strong and weak nominal reference. The second section will discuss thetic and categoric constructions in German and Chinese. The third section deals with the interplay of SL- and IL-predicates, thetic/categorical sentences, and the nominal reference of subjects, whereby the SL- and the IL-predicate are each described in a separate section. Section 4 concludes this paper with a summary of the results obtained in the previous sections.
The German psych-adjectives glücklich (happy) and traurig (sad) and their Japanese counterparts shiawase and kanashii are considered here with regard to their semantics, the hierarchy of thematic roles, and the mode of expression. The attributive usage has a semantic structure with broad focus on the entire structure, which shows a similarity to thetic judgments despite its nonpropositional status. By contrast, the predicative usage with the subject/topic as the stimulus denotes a permanent property of the entity evoking the emotion and consists of two components respectively with narrow focus, which corresponds to the double judgment of categoricals. This structure is possible owing to the property of the copulative predication that it gives the sentence definiteness, but does not give any semantic role to the arguments.
This chapter examines theticity in intransitive sentences. Starting with the assumption that the function of a thetic sentence is to introduce a referent into a discourse (without predicating anything of it), two requirements are proposed to characterize thetic intransitives: (A) the sole argument of the sentence must be vP-internal; and (B) the sole argument must be interpreted as a property. Both requirements have precedents in previous work: (A) incorporates Guéron’s (1980) observations on what she called the Presentation LF; and (B) builds on McNally’s (1998a) work on the semantics and discourse function of existential sentences. These requirements show that theticity cannot be explained by lexical verb or verb class; what matters for theticity is syntactic structure and semantic interpretation. It is then shown that the thetic/categorical distinction cuts across a commonly-accepted distinction in intransitive sentences, the unergative-unaccusative distinction. Specifically, only a subtype of unaccusative sentence, those with the “existential unaccusative” structure (Irwin 2018a), satisfies (A) and (B). By contrast, change-of-state unaccusatives pattern with unergative sentences in not being thetic.
How are the logical terms of thetic and categorical judgments to be distinguished linguistically? The key questions are how judgments can be thought of in terms of linguistics and what the deeper lying reason is for distinguishing the two notions. In our search for an answer, we can be guided by the distinction in Japanese, i.e. through the use of the particle ga for thetics and wa for categoricals. In German, the German equivalents are marked by accent mark and information structural word order. Syntactically, thetics are represented by VP incorporation of all arguments including the subject. The arguments are not subject to syntactic probing mechanisms but follow semantic preference principles. The following sectionss lead the reader through the paper. (1) What is thetic, what is categorical? What is this difference for? (2) Main working hypothesis: From thetic judgment to thetic sentence. (3) Hypothetic definition 1: the thetic sentence in German. (4) Hypothetic definition 2: Thetic – Categorical. (5) Thetics are presentational, not locative and not existential. (6) Accent and information structure. (7) Common ground contents (speech act felicity conditions). (8) Integrational focus: broad and narrow focus (Jacobs 2001). (9) VP-integrated subject ≠ Unaccusative subject. (10) Speaker deixis implied by subject inversion. (11) Special ga-subjects after Onoe 1973: The deeper key to thetics? (12) Linking thetic syntax with Onoe’s special ga-verb class in Japanese? (13) The origo decision for episodicity and genericity. (14) Typological commonalities. (15) Hypothesis: Passives are near-thetic. (16) Conclusion without a real end: the interface mix. (17) Outgoing: leading ideas and main concepts.
According to Marty (1918), thetic statements differ from categorical ones in making a simple existential recognition or rejection rather than a predication. In Japanese, where two subject particles, ga and wa, are presumably available for this differentiation (Kuroda 1972), the point can be expounded especially by the fact that da ‘to be’ hardly appears as an existential verb in ga-marked, but only in wa-marked sentences. Moreover, the same holds true for German optatives. I conclude from these observations that thetic statements find their expression not only pseudocategorically, as originally assumed by Marty (1918), but also in a purely thetic manner in natural languages, provided (at least) there is no personal deictic agreement at work between a syntactic subject and a syntactic predicate.
The distinction between thetics and categoricals in natural language has been observed in more and more languages recently. The theoretical discussion about the thetic/categorical distinction has also become increasingly relevant. This article presents a few challenges to an assertion/judgment-based analysis of the thetic/categorical distinction and offers instead an analysis based on common ground update within a theory of alternative semantics. In this approach, I follow Murray (2009, 2010, 2014) and Roberts (2012) that each sentence offers different kinds of update to the common ground based on the question(s) under discussion (or at-issue/not-at-issue content). I suggest that thetics present a unique type of update which explains why sentences such as It is raining, prosodically inflected sentences (known as those with sentence focus), existentials, and presentatives have been called thetics. Each statement contributes to (or updates) the information interlocutors use, and this common ground shapes the assertions they make. I ultimately propose that the thetic/categorical distinction may no longer be helpful for a description of natural language. Instead, these phenomena can be situated within the increasingly robust frameworks which bridge the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interfaces. Finally, I apply this proposal to a construction type in Biblical Hebrew which I previously labelled a thetic construction in Wilson (2017, 2019).
This study investigates the linguistic subject in categorical and thetic sentences. In the “subjectless” thetic sentence, as Kuroda (1972) pointed out, we have a nonprototypical subject, a B-grade subject, which is preferably combined in Japanese with the nominative marker ga. By contrasting B-grade subjects in Japanese with their corresponding expressions in German (and other languages), we discover two types of subjects, internal and external. In Japanese, B-grade subjects are realizations of internal subjects, which are verbalized differently in other languages as a subject, as a dummy subject, or an object. Comparing different realization forms of weather expressions crosslinguistically, we suggest that the language-specific realizations of B-grade subjects correspond to three types of thetic judgments: entity-central, event-central, and mixed type of both.
This paper aims to explain the relationship between thetic statements and two groups of particles, i.e. Japanese sentence-final particles (sfps) and German modal particles (mps). Thetic statements are generally associated with predicates of temporary states, verbs of existence or verbs of appearance. By examining the properties of predicates in thetic statements, I argue that perception description is a key characteristic for theticity. I propose a common representational framework (Pragmatic Function Representation; PFR) and a distributional map (Spectrum for Persons Involved and Reference Points; SfPI&RP) to capture commonalities and differences of sfps and mps. What is common in the use of sfps and mps is that they both can contribute to form a speech act directed to addressees (report), so that the sentences thus formed are non-thetic. Most sfps contribute to convert private expressions into public ones, which is not the case in German mps.