Indefinite Determiner Research Articles

Definite and Nondefinite Superlatives and NPI Licensing

Abstract. We observe that superlative noun phrases are often not definite and may be headed by an indefinite determiner and other determiners. We attribute this fact to the semantics of the superlative morpheme which creates a (not necessarily singleton) set of individuals. A welcome prediction made by this proposal is that negative polarity items (NPIs) are licensed in the postnominal position only when the determiner that precedes the superlative morpheme is definite, because only then does the superlative morpheme have the semantic property required for NPI licensing—namely, Strawson Downward Entailingness. We explore some semantic and syntactic consequences of the proposal.

Indefinite determiner introducing definite referent: a special use of ‘ yi ‘one’+classifier’ in Chinese

The indefinite determiner ‘ yi ‘one’+classifier’ is the most approximate to an indefinite article, like the English a, in Chinese. It serves all the functions characteristic of representative stages of grammaticalization from a numeral to a generalized indefinite determiner as elaborated in the literature. It is established in this paper that the Chinese indefinite determiner has developed a special use with definite expressions, serving as a backgrounding device marking entities as of low thematic importance and unlikely to receive subsequent mentions in ensuing discourse. ‘ yi+classifier’ in the special use with definite expressions displays striking similarities in terms of semantic bleaching and phonological reduction with the same determiner at the advanced stage of grammaticalization characterized by uses with generics, nonspecifics and nonreferentials. An explanation is offered in terms of an implicational relation between nonreferentiality and low thematic importance which characterize the two uses of the indefinite determiner. While providing another piece of evidence in support of the claim that semantically nonreferentials and entities of low thematic importance tend to be encoded in terms of same linguistic devices in language, findings in this paper have shown how an indefinite determiner can undergo a higher degree of grammaticalization than has been reported in the literature—it expands its scope to mark not only indefinite but also definite expressions as semantically nonreferential and/or thematically unimportant.

Varieties of Indefinites

No abstract.

Indefiniteness and Specificity in Old Italian Texts

The present study shows the necessity to assume, in the process of nominal determiner grammaticalization, an intermediate period between the early facultative marking of important referents and fully grammaticalized article systems. In this intermediate period, especially indefinite determiners seem to be distributed in a quite clearcut way according to the specificity of the referents introduced by the respective noun phrases. Statistical evidence for this is drawn from the distribution of the indefinites uno, alcuno, certo and bare noun phrases in a corpus of three Old Tuscan novella collections. Specificity, understood as the semantic property of non-varying, operator independent interpretation of the variable introduced by an indefinite noun phrase, which makes a continuous anaphoric reference to the respective discourse referent possible, is conceived as a phenomenon of information organization in texts. It seems to be, at this intermediate stage of nominal determiner grammaticalization, a lexical feature of indefinites rather than an effect of syntactic or pragmatic factors.

Three Perspectives on Swedish Indefinite Determiners

This article investigates the meaning and use of singular indefinite determiners in Swedish, in particular the way in which the existential determiner någon/något contrasts with the indefinite article en/ett in different contexts. The problem is approached from three different perspectives, the first being a contrastive Scandinavian perspective, where the Swedish data are reviewed in the light of contrastive data from the closely related languages Danish and Norwegian. Secondly, corpus data are used to substantiate the results of the contrastive analysis both quantitatively and qualitatively. The last section adopts a more theoretical perspective and tries to present a formal semantic analysis of the two determiners under study, drawing on typological work on indefinites and studies of the historical development of indefinite determiners.

Gender agreement in L2 French: Pre‐advanced vs advanced learners

In the analysis of 1352 forms of gender agreement on determiners and adjectives in L2 learners of French, it was found that gender on the definite determiner is acquired before the indefinite determiner, and the masculine before the feminine. This study focuses on two levels of learners, advanced and preadvanced. For the advanced learners the difference in gender acquisition for definite and indefinite determiners is significant, but for the preadvanced learners gender agreement appears randomly, particularly with the indefinite determiner un/une. The advanced learners' accuracy rate for agreement adjectives was not found to be higher for attributive than for predicative adjectives. On the contrary, agreement in anteposition is the most difficult at this level. When Pienemann's processability hierarchy is extended to the mastery and automatization of adjectival agreement, the results clearly indicate that it is the inflection of feminine forms that causes more problems for learners than the exchange of grammatical information across clause boundaries. The difficulties learners have with the morphological form seem to be more predictable and systematic than the difficulties caused by syntactic complexity.

Appositions nominales et déterminant zéro : le cas des appositions frontales

Lélia Picabia - Appositions nominales et déterminant zéro : le cas des appositions frontales Nominal appositions exhibit anaphoric properties and are linked to their antecedent by a BE-type relation. The initial assumption of this paper is that nominal appositions behave as nonref erring, nominal predicates. The comparison of fronted appositions and specificational sentences reveals that in both constructions, the fronted (nonrefe- rential) phrase receives a list-reading, a type of interpretation typically associated with an event-type, stage-level predicate. It further appears that apposed nominals which include a null determiner are steadily associated with a stage-level reading, whatever their linear position with respect to their antecedent; contrastively, apposed nominals which include the overt indefinite determiner (un) are associated with an individual-level readin. A correlate appears to exist between the type of determiner and the syntactic locus of the apposed nominal : the null determiner occurs in fronted appositions (even though these may be moved to the right), while the indefinite determiner occurs in postposed appositions. These descriptive results lead us to conclude that the null and indefinite determiners must have their own syntactic function, and more precisely, must correspond to some functional heads.

Some and the Pragmatics of Indefinite Construal

Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (2000)

Hawaiian He, 'o, and I: Copular Verbs, Prepositions, or Determiners?

Carter (1996) has claimed that the Hawaiian words he, 'o, and i are copular verbs. This paper argues against Carter's claim and presents evidence in favor of the traditional analyses of he as an indefinite determiner and i as a preposition. It also analyzes the 'o that marks predicate nominals as a copular preposition (rather than a copular verb), and it analyzes the i that Carter claims is a copular verb as a preposition that marks resulting entities. Arguments that he, 'o, and i are not copular verbs involve (among other things) tense/aspect markers, syllable length, nominalizations, postposed phrasal elements, as well as the distribution of particular lexical items. Observations conceming situation emphatio sentences, relative clauses, and the anaphoric pronoun ai are used to support the traditional analysis of i as a preposition. Carter's claims concerning he are based on facts conceming differences in syntactic positions of he and the (other) determiners. This paper shows that the same facts are accommodated by a rule that disallows all prepositions (except me 'like') before he. This rule is not ad hoc; it accounts for the lack of prepositions before he when he occurs with a predicate noun, a direct object, and a goal of motion, and it accounts for the absence of the preposition 'o 'of' in the expression ma ke 'ano he 'in the manner (of) a'. Carter's analysis cannot account for the fact that he precedes not only predicate nominals but also intransitive subjects, direct objects, and goals of motion. The proposed analysis is supported by comparative evidence drawn from the related Polynesian languages Maori and Samoan and from Hawaii Creole English.

Light verbs and the syntax of aspect in Yiddish

The stem construction in Yiddish is a type of light verb construction in which a light verb (heading an LVP) takes an Asp(ect)P complement, which in turn takes a VP complement (cf. Travis 1992). The AspP is headed by an aspectual operator, yielding a “diminutivized event” interpretation. A puzzling fact about the stem construction is that the verbal elements seem to reflect an OV order, while Yiddish is in other respects a VO language. This OV-like ordering is a consequence of incorporation. A second, more restricted, type of light verb construction in Yiddish is also discussed, in which the thematic element is an indefinite NP complement. Here there is no AspP; the light verb takes a VP complement which is headed by a null verb which itself takes the predicate nominal as its complement. In both constructions, the light verb semantically selects for a complement which denotes some sort of diminutivized event; the differing distribution of the verbal and nominal forms of the light verb construction results from semantic differences between the Asp operator and the indefinite determiner.

The marking of new information in children's narratives: a comparison of English, French, German and Mandarin Chinese*

ABSTRACTThis study examines children's uses of nominal determiners (‘local markings’) and utterance structure (‘global markings’) to introduce new referents. Two narratives were elicited from preschoolers, seven-year-olds, ten-year-olds, and adults in English (N= 80), French (N= 40), German (N= 40), and Chinese (N= 40). Given typological differences (e.g. richness of morphology), these languages rely differentially on local vs. global devices to mark newness: postverbal position is obligatory in Chinese (determiners optional), indefinite determiners in the other languages (position optional). Three findings recur across languages: obligatory newness markings emerge late (seven-year-olds); local markings emerge first, including Chinese optional ones; local and global markings are strongly related. Crosslinguistic differences also occur: English-speaking preschoolers use local markings least frequently; until adult age global markings are rare in English, not contrastive in German and not as frequent in Chinese as in French, despite obligatoriness. It is concluded that three factors determine acquisition: (1) universal discourse factors governing information flow; (2) cognitive factors resulting from the greater functional complexity of global markings; (3) language-specific factors related to how different systems map both grammatical and discourse functions onto forms.

French children's ability to introduce referents in narratives as a function of mutual knowledge

This study examines referent introductions in narratives produced by French children of 6, 9, and 11 years in two situations where they either could or could not assume mutual knowledge. In one situation (MK) the children and their interlocutor were looking at a picture book together; in the other (NMK) the interlocutor was blindfolded. Children in all age groups used more indefinite determiners in Situation NMK than in MK. However, some clear developmental changes were also found: the 6-year-olds used both definite and indefinite determiners in NMK; the 9-year-olds selected indefinite determiners in NMK and definite ones in MK; the 11-year-olds produced indefinite determiners not only in NMK, but also in MK. These results show that children acquire the rules governing referent introductions in three steps: (a) they have no systematic rule in the absence of mutual knowledge; (b) they acquire a rule associating appropriately different linguistic devices with the presence versus absence of mutual knowledge; (c) they acquire an additional rule that generalizes indefinite forms to all narrative situations, regardless of mutual knowledge conditions.

English Relativization and Certain Related Problems

It is claimed that what and which, both as interrogatives and as relatives, are derived from the same underlying representations, WH + SOME and WH + THAT, respectively. It is assumed that, in the basic form of relativization, the two occurrences of the noun modified by a relative clause, in the matrix and the constituent sentences, may take different determiners. Indeed, all of the four possible ways of distributing the two basic determiners in the matrix and the constituent sentences are claimed to be realized in certain types of relativization. A transformation called DEFINITIZATION which transforms indefinite determiners into definite ones is substantiated in the course of the argument. Some considerations of semantic character are also added.