Demonstrative determiners in crosslinguistic perspective

Reviewed by: Grammatical relations in Romani: The noun phrase ed. by Viktor Elšík, Yaron Matras Anthony P. Grant Grammatical relations in Romani: The noun phrase. Ed. by Viktor Elšík and Yaron Matras. (With an introduction by Frans Plank.) (Current issues in linguistic theory 211.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000. Pp. x, 244. $86.00. The introduction (1–8) treats general themes rather than discussing the individual papers in extenso, covering a wide range of noun-phrase phenomena in Romani ranging from the nature of Romani genitive constructions in crosslinguistic perspective (Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, 123–49) to the possibility of whether Proto-Romani was ergative like other Indic languages (a possibility strongly suggested and well-explored by Vít Bubeník, 205–28). Four of the eight papers in the main body of the collection were given at the Fourth International Conference on Romani Linguistics in Manchester in September 1998; the others are independently-produced works. Romani is indeed a fruitful area of research for students of NPs since it possesses a number of unusual features. These include a dominant possessor-possessed genitival construction in which the relation of the possessor to its possessed is expressed adjectivally and a long-recognized two-tier noun case system in which the secondary cases consist of postpositions soldered onto oblique case-markers (even though Romani is otherwise prepositional and the two features can coexist, inasmuch as certain propositions govern secondary cases). The first feature is also found in other Indic languages whereas the second is much more unusual. Two of the papers are by the first-named editor, the first being an outline of paradigmatic noun inflection (9–30) which serves to orient the reader to much of what follows in later chapters, and the second a discussion (drawing upon the widest range of dialects [End Page 436] in this collection) of the surprising degree of variation in personal pronouns (65–94). The second editor has contributed a close analysis of the structure, function, and distribution of demonstrative pronouns, drawing on a large database of material from most Romani dialect areas. Norbert Boretzky provides a useful survey of the forms and syntax of the definite article in those Romani dialects which have preserved it (31–63), although he does not mention that South Italian Romani dialects use some definite article forms which seem at least superficially to have been borrowed from Italian. Personal and demonstrative pronouns, definite articles, and the areal distribution of the feature of external possession are also covered in this volume. In fact, areal linguistics is well-covered here. Victor A. Friedman’s paper on proleptic and resumptive object pronouns (187–204) points out that in the use of such pronouns, Romani noun phrase syntax preserves some distinctive boundaries which set it off from NP syntax in neighboring Balkan languages, whereas other features of Romani syntax are more readily comparable with parallel syntactic features in Balkan languages. The less than perfect typological overlaps involving Romani dialects are also exemplified in Mily Crevels and Peter Bakker’s paper on external possession in Romani (151–85), where they show that the boundaries between the occurrence of external possession in Romani dialects and its use in coterritorial languages, though similar both in the shared presence of such features in certain dialects (for instance, varieties of Vlax Romani in contact with many Central European languages) and their shared absence in certain other dialects (for instance, Welsh Romani), do not always coincide. (Sinti dialects lack external possession although German, the language which has influenced them most strongly, has it.) The editors have chosen an especially rich focus for their collection without exhausting its possibilities. Further themes are still to be explored in greater depth (for instance, a pandialectal study of Romani adjectival comparative morphology and constructions, with due attention to instances of suppletion, would repay the effort), but a good start has been made here. Anthony P. Grant University of Sheffield, UK Copyright © 2003 Linguistic Society of America

This chapter deals with the doubling of the definite and indefinite article. After a brief introduction to the syntactic and semantic function of (in)definite articles and to the relevance of doubling for syntactic and semantic research, I review the main instantiations of each type of phenomenon. I deal with definite doubling as it is attested in North Germanic languages, in Modern Greek, and in Hebrew. Doubling occurs in these varieties predominantly when adjectival modification is involved; it is obligatory in Hebrew and in certain Northern Germanic languages, and optional in Greek, where it incurs semantic effects related to the restrictive interpretation of the adjective. In the case of Hebrew and Northern Germanic, the debate has revolved around the choice between head movement and phrasal movement within a determiner phrase (DP) analysis of nominals and around the status of the doubling elements; for Hebrew, the idea of a concord relation between the doubling elements has also been exploited. In the case of Greek, major points of controversy have been whether doubling involves an underlying predicative structure and a DP‐internal focus projection. Indefinite doubling is much less widespread cross‐linguistically. It is known to occur in some dialectal variants of Swedish and Norwegian, where it can be argued to involve a predication structure. A different instance of indefinite doubling occurs in Bavarian in the presence of quantificational elements. In this final case, doubling is argued to involve non‐identical elements. The suggestion is made that indefinite doubling as such does not exist at all.

In this study I provide a description of the morphosyntax and the functions of demonstratives in Juba Arabic and Ki-Nubi, two closely related Arabic-based contact languages. The study describes the process of acquisition of demonstrative pronouns and determiners and it explains the formal and functional changes that have taken place in the demonstrative system of Arabic as a consequence of pidginization and subsequent creolization. Broadly speaking, the reduction of the inflection of Arabic demonstratives and the gradual loss of their deictic value corresponds to a change of their grammatical functions along the common grammaticalization pathdeictic demonstrative > anaphoric demonstrative > definite article. However, Juba Arabic and Ki-Nubi clearly differ in terms of both forms and functions of pronominal and adnominal demonstratives. If Juba Arabic demonstratives are characterized by a certain morphological continuity with those of its Arabic lexifier, Ki-Nubi gives evidence of an innovative, and rather complex, system of demonstrative pronouns and determiners. This morphosyntactic divergence is also reflected on a functional ground insofar as the adnominal demonstrativede“this” is mainly used as a tracking device in Juba Arabic, whereas it can mark nominal definiteness in Ki-Nubi. The study eventually proposes a unified diachronic hypothesis that accounts for a greater degree of grammaticalization of nominal determination in Ki-Nubi as a result of its radical creolization.

In the Indo-European languages where a definite article exists, it is historically derived from a demonstrative pronoun. The hypothesis of this paper is that the origin of the definite article is the creation of noun phrase structure by the subordination of a noun to a demonstrative pronoun. This process is described for the Romance languages and Danish. In languages where an indefinite article exists, it is historically derived from the numeral ‘one’. This origin of the indefinite article points out two possible directions for its further evolution: it can continue as a quantifier or it can become a classifier. The quantifier road is illustrated by the plural of the indefinite article in Old French and Spanish, the classifier use by the two indefinite articles of Modern French. Definite and indefinite articles thus have different functions and values: definite articles are pronominal heads, indefinite articles are quantifiers or classifiers.

Variability in the use of the definite article in New Englishes, and in particular, Nigerian English has received the least attention from a quantitative, probabilistic and predictive perspective. The present study narrows this gap by not only assessing the extent to which article use in Nigerian English varies, but by also simultaneously testing out previous claims found in similar varieties, using similar corpus data from the Nigerian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE). Following theoretic framework for article use by Hawkins (1978) and Prince (1981), Wahid (2013) found that variability in definite article usage in New Englishes is more predictable on the basis of genre than on the basis of variety. Revising Wahid’s method and reconceptualising same theoretic frameworks of Hawkins and Prince, together with a comparable corpus sample of 8674 definite article the from ICE-Nigeria, the extent of article usage variability in the Nigerian variety is not only shown but also that variety outweighs genre and syntactic function predicting article usage in New Englishes.

The article concerns constructions such as et herrens år in Danish where the first of the nouns is in the definite form (with a suffixed definite article), in the genitive case and functions as an attribute and not a determiner in relation to the following noun. The determiner (a definite or indefinite article, demonstrative pronoun, etc.), on the other hand, is not linked directly to the following noun but to the one that occurs in the last position of the whole phrase. This stands in contrast to the regular structure of the noun phrase where the determiner refers to the directly following noun (e.g., en bils ejer). In the case of the construction discussed here, however, the determiner refers to the last noun in the phrase (e.g., dette herrens år). Moreover, adjectives can occur before both nouns, but they will always refer to the last noun (e.g., en vældig kræfternes udfoldelse). The work discusses both the grammatical and semantical aspects of the construction. As demonstrated in the article, the construction should not be treated from the perspective of word formation, as it is rather an example of an attributive use of a definite noun in the genitive. Secondly, it is also interesting to point out that the semantic relations within the construction do not fully overlap with the grammatical relations, as from the semantic point of view the determiner, the adjectives, as well as the attributive noun, refer to the main noun. Thirdly, and most importantly, there are strong indications that here we are not dealing with just a few rare examples of a more literary style or certain fixed expressions, but with a regular grammatical construction. To conclude with certainty, however, it is necessary to complement this exploratory research with a corpus study, and preferably also a survey that could reveal the native speakers’ perception of the construction.

In this paper we investigate the syntactic functions and the semantic roles of the Old Persian genitive case. A careful analysis of textual data reveals that, when the genitive is an adnominal modifier, its functions and roles are those typical of this case in a cross-linguistic perspective. However, when the genitive is a clause constituent, its functional range also includes a broad spectrum of other functions and roles, such as Recipient, Addressee or Benefactive. It is well known that in other languages these roles were typically conveyed by the dative which is entirely absent from Old Persian texts. According to the results of our analysis this range of functions and roles can be accounted for if we consider the Old Persian genitive case as a polysemic category, having the expression of the Possessor as its core function. On the other hand, the other attested functions, which are not typical of the genitive, can best be interpreted as radial and metaphorical extensions from the nuclear meaning of Possessor.

This paper examines the evolution of double article systems in two Romance varieties, Balearic Catalan and Picard. In these languages the two definite articles have different syntactic distributions. We account for these double article systems with a multi-layered DP analysis that maps semantically onto Lobner’s (1985, 2011) Uniqueness Scale, further developed in Ortmann (2014). We trace the origins of the present-day definite articles to the Latin demonstrative ille (Catalan, Picard), emphatic pronoun and adnominal ipse (Catalan), and emphatic interjection particle ecce (Picard).The development of the present-day definite articles involved a stage where an emphatic form competed with the demonstrative. In the majority of the present-day Romance languages, a single definite article emerged from the competition that was already underway in Latin. In the Romance varieties considered here, two different forms emerged, but they took on different semantic interpretations. We show how the relevant semantic properties of the three Latin forms are discernible in the distribution of the definite articles that developed from them and that still exist in the present-day varieties.

This is the first typologically-oriented collection on Romani that is devoted to a particular thematic domain — that of noun phrase grammar. The approach taken is unique in that it places this typologically hybrid language in the centre of a general linguistic, universal discussion of the relevant noun phrase phenomena. The book is also the first assembly of articles to deal with Romani as a whole on the basis of cross-dialectal samples, offering areal-typological, dialectological, and historicalinterpretations. The individual contributions discuss morphological and syntactic aspects of nominal and pronominal inflection, definite articles, demonstratives, genitive compounding, external possession, pronominal object doubling and morphosyntactic alignment. Contributors include leading experts in the fields of noun phrase grammar, Romani dialectologists, typologists and historical linguists.<br />

This chapter focuses on empirical evidence for the syntactic mapping of pragmatic features relevant to the interpretation of direct addresses when they come in the shape of vocatives. These features are identified as [2nd person] and [i-p], which are mapped to a functional head (i.e., Voco) projected at the highest level of the extended projection of N. The chapter identifies the functional features that a Vocative Particle may be associated with in syntax; namely, [i-p] and [2nd person], whose successful checking has the effect of endowing a noun with the addressee status. It proposes a formal representation of vocatives, where Vocative Particles, vocative nouns and definite articles are taken into account. Finally, the chapter concludes that the direct address reading comes out of a syntactic configuration where Voco selects a DP/NP and values the person feature of the noun as 2nd person. Keywords: semantic addressee; syntactic mapping; vocative noun; Vocative Particle

Abstract:The following paper investigates the contribution of light verbs to the syntax of English and the ways in which these semantically bleached verbs combine with nominal complements in effective and efficient ways. The research reported on at present examines the usage of light verbs in spontaneous and elicited varieties of spoken and written English, emphasizing their syntactic and pragmatic functions. Crosslinguistic comparisons are also made to Persian, Japanese, and Hindi; such comparisons catalog both universal and language-specific characteristics of light verbs and delimit their intersection of syntax and cultural context. These findings are underlining the position of light verbs concerning syntactic economy and suggest possible implications for linguistic theory and language pedagogics. Future research directions include cognitive and pedagogical applications of light verbs.

In French, Italian, and other Romance languages indefinite nominal phrases can be introduced by what appears to be the conflation of a genitive preposition and a definite article, the so-called "indefinite partitive articles" (e.g., Fr. Je cuisine de la soupe depuis deux jours. 'I've been cooking soup for two days'). This is rather unexpected, since these nominal phrases are neither definite nor in a syntactic position in which we expect to find a genitive preposition. This led part of the literature to consider them as built by lexical items synchronically distinct from the genitive preposition/definite article but homophonous with them. This contribution shows how a constituent-based approach to the lexicon-syntax interface as nanosyntax, paired with a specific take on the sequence of syntactic functions, can capture their apparently conflicting distribution without stipulating multiple homophonous lexical items. The key factor in this proposal is a revised analysis of the Romance lexical item (LI) for (i)definite articles- linked to a constituent containing not only features of definiteness but also lower indefinite features and higher nominative/accusative case features- and (ii) the genitive preposition DE- linked to a constituent containing not only genitive features but also lower nominative/accusative features. Holding these LIs crosslinguistically stable, the variation attested in this domain is modeled as depending on the amount of functional structure lexicalized by the nominal root in the different languages.

An important syntactic system in the noun phrase (NP) is the definite article system. The definite article system in emerging varieties of English, such as Nigerian and Indian, have been shown to manifest varying degrees of variability in their usages, given different contexts (Platt, Weber and Ho, 1984; Wahid, 2013; Akinlotan, 2016b; Akinlotan 2017). In addition to the fact that little has been done in quantifying this phenomenon, too little number of predictors explicating the scenarios where we might find certain definite article usages in different but specific contexts in emerging varieties has also been put forward. Following Wahid (2013), a revision of Hawkins’s (1978) theoretical framework for the definite article usages, together with test statistic, the present study investigated 19276 tokens of the, spread across seven text types of academic, media, learner, interactional, popular, literary, and administrative. The study which Akinlotan expands (2017) shows that previously untested predictors of presence/absence of premodification and determiner structure, animacy and class of the head noun, and syntactic function of the NP, account for variability in the definite article usage in our corpus. In fact, these newly tested predictors show stronger influence than a well-known predictor of register (Biber et al., 1999; Wahid, 2013).

The article examines the use of the demonstrative pronoun tot in the language of The History of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire (manuscript BAN, 31.3.22), which was translated by Piotr Tolstoy from Italian at the beginning of the 18 th century. The examples of tot are grouped by syntactic and semantic functions and compared to the Italian original. While some Italian-Russian parallels for other demonstratives are merely constant (such as quello - onyj , questo - sei , tale , tanto - takoj ), the demonstrative tot can be used to translate any Italian anaphoric demonstrative, which indicates that it was being unmarked as a means of anaphora. The noun + tot group often serves as the equivalent of a noun with a definite article, but in these cases an antecedent can be found in the preceding text and therefore the demonstrative is a means of anaphora; if an antecedent cannot be found, the translator has to use another grammar construction. This implies that the demonstrative tot was not a complete analogue of the definite article. In many cases tot does not have a corresponding demonstrative in the Italian text: the fact that reveals the various grammatical functions of tot . For example, as a determiner, it is widely used in the Russian text to translate different Italian syntactic constructions; some adverbial collocations and compound conjunctions with tot are used to translate Italian adverbs and conjunctions that do not contain demonstratives.

Every language has at least two demonstratives or deictic terms, a proximal one and a distal one, and some languages in addition have a medial (or some other additional) demonstrative. Demonstratives exhibit a variety of grammatical and pragmatic functions, and they also serve as major sources for the development of various important grammatical devices, such as copulas, relativizers, definite articles, and complementizers. However, lexical sources for demonstratives remain largely unknown, as do the mechanisms leading to their emergence. Based on a database of more than 1000 subdialects of Chinese, this article demonstrates that the distal demonstratives in these subdialects are phonologically derived from their corresponding proximal demonstratives, which were themselves grammaticalized from classifiers in Late Medieval Chinese. This finding identifies a new type of mechanism leading to the emergence of grammatical items: within a pair of two closely related grammatical elements, the basic and unmarked member originates from a lexical source, and gives rise to the other member through certain phonological principles. The domain of demonstratives thus illustrates how processes of grammaticalization and phonological derivation can interact giving rise to the emergence of new grammatical forms.