Studies on Tautology in the framework of the Mental Space Theory

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I studied tautology and clarified the mechanism by which tautological copular sentences 'X be X', usually taken to be meaningless in the level of semantics, transmit various interpretations in their actual use. Copular sentences in natural language have two usages which are quite similar in form but sharply different in meaning : identifying sentences assign values to non-referential noun phrases (ex. 'The author of the Fleurs du Mal is Baudelaire.') ; descriptive sentences add properties to objects which are already identified (ex. 'Baudelaire is the author of the Fleurs du Mal.'). Tautological copular sentences have four uses in all : identifying sentence and its negation, descriptive sentences have four uses in all : identifying sentence and its negation, descriptive sentence and its negation. I studied each of them by assembling and analysing examples and constructed an integral theory of tautology in terms of categorization based on the prototype semantics. I showed thus that usual tautological sentences are descriptive sentences and that they can bring about various interpretations according to the categorization presupposed in the context of utterance. I also showed the specificity of identifying tautology and the mechanism of its interpretations. This research is a part of the project to construct a model for accounting for semantic phenomena which lie outside of conventional meaning. In order to study relations between language and knowledge, I also studied indirect object constructions in French, typological variance from the viewpoint of congnitive linguistics, the Japanese deictic verb of movement "kuru" (to come) and its compound forms, metaphors in the framework of the Mental Space theory.