Abstract

The paper investigates conditions for the bare occurrence of noun phrases in the topic position of specificational copula clauses in German. It is shown that this is a predicate position for non-referential NPs. Specificational clauses in German are special because of the unusual alignment of the predicative position with the topic position. I show that the condition for the bare occurrence of NPs in this position is that the head noun denotes a functional concept. According to the theory of concept types by Löbner (2011), nouns denoting functional concepts are relational and unique. I argue that relationality ensures the anchoring of bare NPs in the discourse via an anaphoric link to a bridging antecedent in the previous discourse and qualifies them to be a topic in the sense of discourse-familiarity. The uniqueness of such NPs is the key to understanding why they can occur bare without a definite article: they belong to the type of definite descriptions in which definiteness is based on uniqueness. The article in uniqueness- based DPs encodes uniqueness and indicates morphological case. Since NPs denoting functional concepts are already unique, and as complements of the copula are not assigned case, the article need not be realized.

Highlights

  • In German, countable nouns in the singular generally need an article if they occur in the subject position

  • Provided that the form of a pronoun reflects the semantic type of its antecedent, and the NP1 in specificational clauses can only be pronominalized by the pro-predicative pronouns, we have to assume that NP1 is not referential but rather predicative

  • The aim of the paper has been to identify the syntactic and semantic conditions for article drop in NPs used as topics of specificational clauses

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Summary

Introduction

In German, countable nouns in the singular generally need an article if they occur in the subject position. (4) Präsident des Seegerichtshofs ist seit Oktober 2011 der Japaner Shunji Yanai. (5) Vater des Babys ist der [...] Schauspieler Pete Dwojak. (4’’) Der Präsident des Seegerichtshofs ist seit Oktober 2011 der Japaner Shunji Yanai. The question I want to answer in this paper is what the syntactic and semantic conditions are that allow omission of the definite article with initial NPs in such constructions.

Sentence type
Discourse conditions on NP1
The referential type of NP1
Bare NPs as specificational predicates
Empirical observations
Bare NPs in predicational and specificational clauses
The concept type of bare specificational predicates
Analysis
Two levels of definiteness
Bare specificational topics as uniqueness-based definites
Conclusion
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