Study of a group of logical connectors in English demonstrates how the meanings of those connectors signal the grounding of the clauses they introduce in absolute terms, unlike other linguistic means of grounding performed by tense, aspect, mood, voice, or verbal categories. (14 references) (Author/CB)

Working within the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework of Anna Wierzbicka, this study proposes reductive paraphrase explications for a range of first-person pronominal meanings. It is argued that NSM explications are preferable to conventional feature analysis because they are less subject to charges of arbitrariness and obscurity and…