A Definite Article in the AP – Evidence from Colloquial Slovenian

Abstract

Slovenian has a kind of definite article, TA, which is intimately linked with adjectives and can appear also in indefinite noun phrases. Although it has traditionally been known simply as 'definite article' (e.g. Toporisic 2000, Herrity 2000), these two properties make it clearly different from the standard definite articles in English, German, Italian, Bulgarian, etc. It also differs from the definite articles that appear on adjectives in languages with determiner spreading or polydefinite constructions, such as Greek, Swedish, etc., since those definite articles cannot occur in indefinite noun phrases. In this paper, we show how this element differs from the abovementioned, better-known phenomena in other European languages, proposing that it does not quantify over individuals but rather over degrees. We thus analyze TA as having nothing to do with definiteness or specificity functional projections of the noun phrase but rather as a definite article of the adjective phrase. We propose to treat this adjectival definiteness as determination of the degree to which an adjective holds, which we encode through the DP-like 'determiner' position in the extended projection of the AP. In doing so, we also extend the parallel that is often drawn between the structure of the clause and the noun phrase to the adjectival domain as well. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the basic facts about TA’s distribution. Section 3 puts TA in the context of other definite articles, demonstrating that it is comparable neither to standard definite articles nor to some other adjective-associated definite articles, but that it is more or less parallel to the 'long-form' adjectives in formal/written Slovenian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. In section 4, we look at the meaning contribution of TA, concluding that it is neither definiteness nor specificity of the noun phrase, but rather definiteness of the adjectival subpart of the noun phrase. In section 5, we lay out the proposal and in section 6 we conclude.