Kaja Borthen
Background and activities
Research interests
- Pragmatics
- Semantics (especially non-truth-conditional semantics)
I am interested in the encoded meaning of linguistic items and how these meanings together with pragmatic principles lead to specific interpretations of utterances in context. More specifically, I have worked on topics such as referring expressions, implicatures, and pragmatic particles.
Ongoing and previous research projects to which I have contributed (or led)
- The meaning and function of NOrwegian Tags (NOT) (financed by the Research Council of Norway 2014-2017)
- The Distribution and Meaning of Nominal Forms in Norwegian; a Cross-linguistic Perspective (RCN grant 2007-2009). Project leader: Thorstein Fretheim.
- BREDT - Behandling av Referanse i Diskurs Teori (Goal: automatic anaphor resolution) (RCN grant 2003-2006). Project leader: Christer Johansson.
- Norwegian bare singulars (PhD project 1999-2003)
Courses
- SPRÅK8873 - Linguistic Theory
- SPRÅK8861 - Methods of Linguistics
- NORD3104 - Special Subject in Scandinavian Linguistics
- SPRÅK8867 - Theories and Methods in Linguistics
Scientific, academic and artistic work
Displaying a selection of activities. See all publications in the database
Journal publications
- (2021) Pronominal right-dislocation in Norwegian. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics. vol. 6 (1).
- (2021) Finalpartiklar i norske talemål: Ei undersøking av variasjon knytt til geografi, alder og kjønn. Maal og Minne. vol. 113 (1).
- (2019) The semantics and pragmatics of Norwegian sentence-internal jo. Nordic Journal of Linguistics. vol. 42 (1).
- (2018) Pronominal høyredislokering i norsk, det er et interessant fenomen, det. NLT - Norsk lingvistisk tidsskrift. vol. 36 (2).
- (2018) Store spørsmål om små ord. Innledning til temanummer om pragmatiske partikler i norsk. NLT - Norsk lingvistisk tidsskrift. vol. 36 (2).
- (2018) "Æ e trønder, æ, sjø" Den pragmatiske partikkelen 'sjø' i midt-norske dialektar. NLT - Norsk lingvistisk tidsskrift. vol. 2 (36).
- (2014) Hva betyr 'da', da?. NLT - Norsk lingvistisk tidsskrift. vol. 32.
- (2014) Semantiske og pragmatiske aspekter ved trykklett visst :. NLT - Norsk lingvistisk tidsskrift. vol. 32 (2).
- (2012) Om det uuttalte - det relevansteoretiske implikaturbegrepet i møte med autentiske data. NLT - Norsk lingvistisk tidsskrift. vol. 30 (1).
- (2011) Response to Chen and Wu´s paper "Less well-behaved pronouns : Singular They in English and plural ta 'it/he/she' in Chinese. Journal of Pragmatics. vol. 43 (1).
- (2010) On how we interpret plural pronouns. Journal of Pragmatics. vol. 42 (7).
- (2010) Introduction: Linguistic and cognitive aspects of reference. Journal of Pragmatics. vol. 42 (7).
- (2005) Representing Referential Properties of Nominals. Research on Language & Computation. vol. 3 (2).
- (2003) "Cognitive Status, Information Structure, and Pronominal Reference to Clausally Introduced Entities". Journal of Logic, Language and Information. vol. 3.
- (2002) "Information structure and the accessibility of clausally introduced referents". Theoretical Linguistics. vol. 27.
Part of book/report
- (2021) The Norwegian tag "da" in comparison to English "then". Pragmatic Markers and Peripheries.
- (2019) Different senses of 'referential'. The Oxford Handbook on Reference.
- (2017) Norwegian bare singulars revisited. The very model of a modern linguist — in honor of Helge Dyvik.
- (2014) Referring expressions in speech reports. Psycholinguistic Approaches to Meaning and Understanding across Languages.
- (2014) Referential and functional aspects of the Norwegian first person plural 'vi'. Constructing collectivity. 'We' across languages and contexts.
- (2007) The correspondence between cognitive status and the form of kind-referring NPs. The Grammar-Pragmatics Interface.