Abstract
Germanic and Romance languages with prenominal determiners always require the use of the definite article with river names. This property sets river names apart from other place names that either do not take an article (city names) or display strong cross-linguistic variation (country names). We argue that the requirement to appear with a definite article correlates with a fundamental semantic property that distinguishes river names and common nouns that refer to rivers from other proper names and common nouns: their lexical underspecification for boundedness. We argue that this underspecification must be resolved syntactically through the presence of a definiteness feature provided by the definite article.
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