Indefinite Determiner Research Articles

The decline of feminine gender: a cross-dialectal study of seven Norwegian dialects

This paper presents a cross-dialectal study of grammatical gender in Norwegian nominal phrases. Specifically, we investigate the decline of the feminine gender in three age groups across seven different dialects. The dialects vary in their morphological richness of gender marking: some dialects traditionally have more distinctive marking of the feminine gender. With an elicited production experiment, we investigate gender marking on the indefinite determiner and the definite suffix. We find that feminine gender is in decline in all dialects, but there are clear differences between the locations and between age groups. The feminine indefinite determiner ei is replaced by the masculine en at different rates and to a different degree in the various dialects. We furthermore find that the feminine definite suffix -a is retained in all locations except for Stavanger. We argue that the decline of the feminine gender can be explained by an interplay between the morphological richness of the given dialect and dialect contact. The former helps to retain the feminine as a separate category, while the latter accelerates the loss of the feminine.

Noun phrases in Kwéyòl Donmnik

Abstract Though Creole nominal systems have been intensely researched, in-context, corpus-based examinations are uncommon, and there are Creole languages whose noun phrases remain understudied. I use a corpus of conversational data and a pattern-building task designed to elicit demonstrative and definite noun phrases, exophoric reference, and co-speech pointing gestures to explore the noun phrase in Kwéyòl Donmnik, an endangered, understudied French lexifier Creole. I focus on noun phrases that are bare, marked by the post-nominal determiners definite la ‘the’ or demonstrative sa-la ‘this/that’, or accompanied by the pre-nominal indefinite determiner yon ‘a(n)’. Results pinpoint the readings conveyed by each noun phrase type, identify the word categories of their nouns, and address similarities in usage between definite la and demonstrative sa-la.

On the property-denoting clitic ne and the determiner de/di: a comparative analysis of Catalan and Italian

Abstract The clitic pronoun ne and the functional element de introducing nominal constituents have many nominal and prepositional functions across Romance languages. In this article, we focus on the nominal functions, singling out three different bundles of semantic features that characterize both ne and de. They can denote properties of individual entities, properties of kinds, or predicate properties. The article shows that Catalan ne and de display the three types of denotation, while Italian ne and de only display the first one. This article further supports the hypothesis that the indefinite determiner de can be overt or silent, thereby unifying de-phrases (and the Italian partitive article) with bare nouns. The analysis of de as an indefinite determiner is then extended to adjectival de, which is claimed to mark concord features on adjectives in both Catalan and Italian.

Definiteness marking in American Norwegian: a unique pattern among the Scandinavian languages

This paper examines definiteness marking in American Norwegian (AmNo), a heritage variety of Norwegian spoken in the US. The description adds another language to the much-studied variation within Scandinavian nominal phrases. It builds on established syntactic analysis of Scandinavian and investigates aspects that are (un)like Norwegian spoken in the homeland. A central finding is that the core syntax of Norwegian noun phrases is retained in AmNo, while the morphophonological spell-out is sometimes different. Indefinite determiners, for example, are obligatory in AmNo, but some speakers produce them with non-homeland-like gender agreement. One systematic change is observed: double definiteness has been partially lost. The typical AmNo modified definite phrase lacks the prenominal determiner that is obligatory for varieties in Norway. I argue that this is a syntactic change which allows the realization of D to be optional. This is a pattern not found in the other Scandinavian languages. At the same time, this innovative structure in AmNo is not like English, the dominant language of the AmNo speakers. This demonstrates heritage language change that is distinct from both the homeland language and the dominant language.

Processing references in context: when the polar bear does not meet a polar bear

Discourse understanding is hampered when missing or conflicting context information is given. In four experiments, we investigated what happens (a) when the definite determiner “the,” which presupposes existence and uniqueness, does not find a unique referent in the context or (b) when the appropriate use of the indefinite determiner is violated by the presence of a unique referent (Experiment 1 and Experiment 2). To focus on the time-course of processing the uniqueness presupposition of the definite determiner, we embedded the determiner in different sentence structures and varied the context (Experiment 3 and Experiment 4). Reading time served as an index of processing difficulty in a word-by-word self-paced reading task and acceptability judgments provided hints for a possible repair of a presupposition violation. Our results showed that conflicting and missing context information lowered acceptability ratings and was associated with prolonged reading times. The pattern of results differed depending on the nature of the presupposition (Experiments 1 and 2) and whether supplementing missing context information was possible (Experiment 3 and Experiment 4). Our findings suggest that different cognitive processes come into play when interpreting presuppositions in order to get a meaningful interpretation of a discourse.

From approximation to probability: bi’ + numeral constructions in Turkish

This paper provides a semantic analysis of bi’ + numeral constructions in Turkish (e.g., Markete varmak için bi’ 20 metre daha yürüyeceksin). Although there are similarities between bi'+ numeral constructions in Turkish and some+ numeral constructions in English, there are unexplained situations about the bi' structure in Turkish. We claim that the presence of the indefinite determiner bi’ ‘some’ in such constructions is licensed by the presence of the probability operator PROB at the sentence level.

Probing the role of bounding, definiteness and other factors: bare noun and determiner use in Guianese French Creole

From a cognitive‑semantic perspective, two important conceptual schemas underlie determiner use and the count/mass distinction in languages such as English and French, namely bounding and definiteness. This paper investigates to what extent these concepts are related to noun phrase marking in Guianese French Creole (GFC). The corpus‑based analysis shows that GFC uses bare nouns not only with unbounded entities and in non‑referential and generic contexts, but also for representing singular and plural indefinite and definite referents. At the same time, GFC shows a clear count/mass distinction and also has definite and indefinite determiners. However, in contrast to article languages such as English and French, bounding and definiteness need to be examined alongside semantic‑pragmatic and discourse‑informational criteria in order to explain the use of determiners and bare nouns in GFC. Thus, determiner use as a grammatical individuation strategy clearly has a different weight in GFC, which does not fit into cross‑linguistic typologies of articleless and article languages (e.g. Chierchia 1998). The comparative results on GFC, French and English also serve to evaluate two recent typological claims: while they confirm Le Bruyn et al.’s (2017) hypothesis on a correlation between the richness of the article system and the freedom of bare noun use, Abraham et al.’s (2007) claim of a universally complementary distribution of articles and grammatical aspect distinctions in the verb phrase is not supported by the data.

The Syntax of Polish jeden ‘One’ as an Indefinite Determiner

The current literature on Polish jeden ‘one’ focuses on its numeral status, though there is evidence that it is grammaticalizing into an indefinite determiner. This article provides a syntactic analysis of jeden in its different functions, trying to account for its grammaticalization process. Quantificational/adjectival jeden is hosted in the specifier of a DP-internal NumP projection. Indefinite specific jeden is inserted in SpecDP for referential reasons. Moreover, some occurrences of nonspecific jeden may suggest a reanalysis of SpecDP into the head D. These structural changes are in line with other processes of grammaticalization and follow the same Economy principles. This model also builds parallels with Italian and Italo-Romance indefinite determiners.

Optionality in the Expression of Indefiniteness: A Pilot Study on Piacentine

Optionality is an issue within the minimalist theory of language, in which the principle of the “last resort” does not admit competing options to express the same meaning. What is needed is a solid empirical base showing that apparently competing forms do specialize for some syntactic/semantic traits. Hence, the aim of this pilot study is to investigate optionality in the choice of competing indefinite determiners in Piacentine, an Italo-Romance variety spoken in north-western Italy. Sixteen native Piacentine speakers were presented with a questionnaire to collect linguistic data. Statistical analyses of the data were performed to seek correlations between the choice of the indefinite determiners and some syntactic/semantic traits that were controlled for. The results indicate that Piacentine displays four main determiners, labeled ART, di+art, bare di, and ZERO. ART and di+art are the most widespread determiners allowing both narrow and wide scope and occurring in all the investigated contexts. Bare di is instead the unmarked form for expressing non-existential indefiniteness in negative contexts and only has narrow scope. ZERO co-varies with bare di, and its use was strengthened by contact with Italian, preventing its loss, differently from French, which lost ZERO instead.

Indefinite determiners in two northern Italian dialects

Italian and Italian dialects express indefiniteness in different ways, among which with a null determiner (ZERO) like all other Romance languages, but also with the definite article (ART) unlike what is found in Romance. Italian and some northern Italian dialects also display the so-called “partitive determiner” DI+ART, which is present in French. Few northwestern Italian dialects display (bare) DI, parallel to French. We adopt Cardinaletti and Giusti’s (2015, 2016) unified analysis and build on Cardinaletti and Giusti’s (2018, 2020) hypothesis that the variation and optionality in the distribution of the four determiners in regional Italian mirror their distribution in Italian dialects along two isoglosses: the ART isogloss spreading from the center of Italy towards north-west and south-east; and the DI isogloss spreading from Piedmont eastwards. We conduct a quantitative analysis on the results of a questionnaire in Piacentino and Rodigino. We test the distribution of the four determiners with mass and count nouns in two dimensions: sentence type (positive vs. negative) and predicate type (telic vs. atelic). The results confirm the hypothesis that the complexity of the determiner is related to its distribution highlighting two hierarchies of contexts: NEG < POS and ATEL < TEL. It also confirms that Piacentino, located at the crossroads of the ART and DI isoglosses, has more optionality than Rodigino, located at their borders.

Indefiniteness in Francoprovençal. A Real Bare de? New Hints from the Consonantal Liaison

In Romance languages the indefinite articles are generally the result of prepositions + determiners (P + D) contraction, de + definite Article, combined with nominals within indefinite Determiners Phrases (DPs). However, some Romance languages show bare articles or bare nouns vs. explicit articles. Thus, Romance languages show asymmetry and competition between cover determiners and bare nouns. All Gallo–Romance varieties have undergone a grammaticalization process, which turns a prepositional phrase (de‑P PP) into a Determiner Phrase (de‑D DP). In this article we focus on the expression of indefiniteness in Francoprovençal (a Gallo–Romance language), sketching the existence of a sub–grammar for its indefinite markers. The Francoprovençal indefinite articles do not seem to have undergone the fusion of the article and the preposition (as in French du ‘some’), but its indefiniteness appears to come from the preposition alone de. A consonantal liaison contributes to the morphosyntactic indefiniteness inside the Francoprovençal DP. Yet, the preposition de ‘of’ without articles, is categorized as D°, a functional marker of indefiniteness. Crucially, the latent liaison consonant is not the result of a contraction of P + Article, but it is issued from two contracted Latin prepositions (P + P).

Deixis in the Dagaare Nominal Group: Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Perspectives

Although the use of multiple deictic items such as definite articles, possessives and demonstratives in the nominal group of many languages has been noted in the literature, the motivation for this phenomenon is often unexplained. The present study examines this phenomenon in the Lobr dialect of Dagaare (Niger-Congo: Mabia/Gur) from both syntagmatic and paradigmatic perspectives. It first identifies three deictic functions in the structure of the Dagaare nominal group: Deictic1 ^ Deictic2 ^ Classifier ^ Thing ^ Epithet ^ Numerative ^ Deictic3 ^ Qualifier. Second, the study shows that the system of deixis in the Dagaare nominal group involves a division of semiotic labor among deictic elements in the realization of (participant) identification, person systems and specificity. Specifically, the definite article is used as a participant tracking device, including the reactivation of participants with unique reference from the common memory of the speaker and addressee. Demonstratives are specificity marking devices and thus encode discrete semantic information of referents, while indefinite determiners are non-specificity markers. The study combines issues that have been pursued as separate topics in the literature to shed insights on deixis in the nominal group as well as related concepts such as definiteness and specificity.

The Acquisition of Grammatical Gender of Determiners in Danish Monolingual and Bilingual Children: An Experimental Study

This paper examines the acquisition of grammatical gender of indefinite and definite DPs in Danish. It investigates which grammatical contexts further acquisition and which slow it down, and whether distinguishing between monolinguals and bilinguals makes a difference. Danish has a two-way gender distinction (common and neuter), fusing gender with definiteness in the DP. In order to answer our research questions, we tested monolingual and bilingual Danish-speaking children (n=72) from different age groups using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, a Picture Description Task, and a Story Task. A generalized linear mixed effects regression analysis of the results showed that i) the children produced the Standard Danish determiner significantly more often with common than with neuter nouns; ii) the children produced significantly more Standard Danish gender marking in simple DPs than in complex DPs; iii) the children produced significantly more expressions with definite determiners realized as suffixes than with indefinite determiners expressed as prenominal articles in accordance with conventional norms; and iv) bilingual children produced significantly less Standard Danish gender marking than their monolingual peers, but ceiling effects in the monolingual group made it impossible to examine interactions between group and grammatical context.*

Involuntary Syntactic Error of Interlingual Word Order When English Rigid Word Order Momentarily Deforms Arabic Clauses

This paper intends to explore the potential momentary influence of English rigid word order on the placement of Arabic preverbal subjects. The idea is that English as a Subject-Verb-Object language has one subject position; thus, it poses no restrictions on the distribution of determiner phrases in this position. By contrast, Standard Arabic (henceforth, Arabic) uses two different word orders (Subject-Verb/Verb-Subject-(Object), SVO/VSO). As a result, indefinite determiner phrases are not freely distributed in the subject position; that is, they can appear in the postverbal subject position -VSO but not in the preverbal subject position -SVO. Because the two languages use different syntactic word orders and different subject positions, two experimental tasks (an Arabic guided writing task and an English-to-Arabic translation written task) were administered to find out whether the English word order momentarily causes Arabic learners of English to violate their language subject distributions. Analysis of the performance of Arabic native participants in the two tasks revealed two important outcomes: a) when participants were asked to reorder scrambled words into full clauses, they significantly preferred VSO order; in contrast, b) when participants were asked to translate full English clauses into Arabic, they strikingly preferred SVO order violating syntactic parametric (distributional) restrictions on the placement of indefinite determiner phrases. In other words, they used indefinite determiner phrases in the preverbal subject position. Based on the results, the study argues that the improper use of indefinite determiner phrases in the preverbal subject position is not due to the implicit knowledge of Arabic grammar; it is due to the momentary influence of English syntactic word order involuntarily exerted by participants.

The telic “se” and the delimitation of the verbal complement in spanish spoken in Argentina and Venezuela

La telicidad es una noción aspectual semántica que se caracteriza por la presencia de un punto final inherente de la situación marcado lingüísticamente. En español, hay un clítico que se conoce por se télico que se puede usar solamente en sentencias que transmiten el valor aspectual télico. Según De Miguel (1999) la presencia de determinantes plurales indefinidos en el complemento verbal conduce a una lectura atélica y, por eso, no se puede usar el se télico en sentencias que contengan dicha construcción, al paso que, para Gomes y Martins (en prensa), basados en datos del español de España, esa construcción verbal conduce a una lectura télica y, por lo tanto, el uso del se télico es posible. Así, se objetiva en este trabajo verificar si se puede combinar el se télico con verbos cuyos complementos sean introducidos por determinantes plurales indefinidos en el español de Argentina y de Venezuela. Para este fin, se aplicó un test de juicio de gramaticalidad comentado a 15 hablantes nativos de esas variedades. Los resultados indican que dicha combinación es posible en ambas. Se discutió que el valor aspectual télico de una sentencia no depende de una cuantificación precisa para la delimitación del complemento.

Capacity limitations of processing presuppositions triggered by determiners

Definite determiners trigger existence- and uniqueness-presuppositions, that is, the speaker assumes that it is taken for granted that there exists exactly one of the mentioned object in the relevant discourse. Indefinite determiners are associated with anti-uniqueness, that is, that there are several of the mentioned object. Applying the Maximize Presupposition principle, this additional meaning component arises as an anti-presupposition and involves first considering the definite determiner's uniqueness-presupposition and then its negation. We here investigate processing of the two determiners in more detail and ask whether this processing is automatic or requires limited central capacities. To do so, we employed the Psychological Refractory Period (PRP) approach and the locus of slack-logic. We observed more difficult processing for the indefinite compared to the definite determiner in felicitous sentences, and also in infelicitous compared to felicitous sentences. Further, immediate processing of the indefinite determiner appears capacity-limited. These results support the Maximize Presupposition principle and are an important step forward toward understanding cognitive processing of presuppositions.

Garra dos líderes e capital psicológico dos liderados: Uma exploração concetual de condições moderadoras

A garra (termo aqui traduzido de grit) tem sido encarada como crucial para o sucesso dos indivíduos e a eficácia dos líderes, embora alguns autores não sustentem essa tese. A investigação empírica é escassa e pouco conclusiva. Um possível caminho para melhor compreender este construto passa por considerar condições moderadoras. Aqui discutimos três dessas condições: (1) garra veiculada pelo líder versus garra autoatribuída; (2) humildade expressa pelo líder; (3) apoio social expresso pelo líder. O modelo concetual argumenta que o líder que veicula mais garra perante os liderados desenvolve o capital psicológico destes, mas esse efeito é mitigado, ou mesmo anulado, se o líder for desprovido de humildade e não facultar apoio social aos liderados. Distintamente, o líder estimula o capital psicológico dos liderados se, além de veicular garra, também expressar humildade e apoio social aos liderados.

Indefinite determiners in informal Italian: A preliminary analysis

Abstract This paper presents the results of a pilot study on the distribution of indefinite determiners in contexts with narrow scope interpretation in current informal Italian. It individuates the available forms and presents their diatopic distribution. The research is based on data collected through an online questionnaire designed to detect optionality. The results show that in narrow scope indefinite contexts, i. e., negative statements, both the zero determiner and the definite article are widespread throughout the country. The partitive determiner is only found in episodic sentences and is limited to restricted geographic areas. In all contexts and areas, a large degree of optionality is found. In some context and area, however, it is possible to identify one form more prominent than the others. This can be related to the context, which may favour some specialized meaning of one specific form, e. g., saliency and small quantity, or to diatopic variation due to language contact with the dialect, as shown by comparing present-day informal Italian with the dialectal data reported in AIS and analysed in (Cardinaletti and Giusti. 2018. Indefinite determiners: Variation and optionality in Italo-Romance. In Diego Pescarini & Roberta D’Alessandro (eds.), Advances in Italian dialectology: Sketches of Italo-Romance grammars, 135–161. Amsterdam: Brill).

Presuppositions of determiners are immediately used to disambiguate utterance meaning: A mouse-tracking study on the German language

The present study investigated how listeners understand and process the definite and the indefinite determiner. While the definite determiner clearly conveys a uniqueness presupposition, the status of the anti-uniqueness inference associated with the indefinite determiner is less clear. In a forced choice production task, we observed that participants make use of the information about number usually associated with the two determiners to convey a message. In a subsequent mouse-tracking task, participants had to select one of two potential referents presented on screen according to an auditorily presented stimulus sentence. The data revealed that participants use the information about uniqueness or anti-uniqueness encoded in determiners to disambiguate sentence meaning as early as possible, but only when they are exclusively faced with felicitous uses of determiners.

Domain Restriction in Generic Statements

ABSTRACT Domain restriction is a pervasive if often neglected part of discourse comprehension. Speakers and authors implicitly limit the domain of discourse of quantifiers (e.g., everyone) and noun phrases (e.g., the girls). Our previous research shows that an initial temporal or locative prepositional phrase (PP), which introduces a topic situation, is the preferred context for interpreting the domain of subject noun phrases in the same sentence or a subsequent sentence. In this research, the sentences and minidiscourses were about concrete nongeneric situations. The present article reports three experiments designed to explore domain restriction in generic statements. Experiment 1 shows that indefinite determiners and the presence of a modal (would) favor generic interpretations. In Experiments 2 and 3 a sentence initial (vs. sentence final) PP increased interpretation of the subject as being restricted to the topic situation as well as increasing the frequency of generic interpretations. We propose that in sentences with modals (would) the initial PP acts as the antecedent of a conditional. Furthermore, based on differences in responses depending on whether the genericity of the subject or the temporal restriction on the subject are posed, we suggest that domain restriction is an inference from the representation constructed during discourse comprehension while a decision about genericity is a part of core sentence interpretation.