Definiteness as an Information Structure

Definiteness and Structure of NPs in Slavic

Specificity and Definiteness in Sentence and Discourse Structure

The paper gives a contrastive analysis of the two semantic categories specificity and definiteness. It argues against the traditional picture that assumes that specific expressions are a subclass of indefinite NPs. The paper rather assumes that the two categories are independent of each other. Definiteness expresses the discourse pragmatic property of familiarity, while specificity mirrors a mo...

Iterating Definiteness

A central concept in the study of vagueness is the concept of a borderline case. This concept has its most basic application when we are faced with a question of the form ‘Is x F?’, but are unwilling to answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ for a certain distinctive kind of reason. Wanting to be co-operative, we need to say something; by saying ‘It’s a borderline case’, we excuse our failure to give a straightf...

Mood as Verbal Definiteness in a “Tenseless” Language*

This article argues that the mood morphemes found on punctual verbs in Mohawk are to be analyzed semantically as markers of verbal definiteness. In particular, the so-called future marker is actually an indefinite morpheme indicating that the event argument of the verb undergoes Heim’s (1982) rule of Quantifier Indexing. In contrast, the seeming past marker is a definite morpheme, indicating th...

Definiteness and Indefiniteness *

The prototypes of definiteness and indefiniteness in English are the definite article the and the indefinite article a/an, and singular noun phrases (NPs) determined by them. That being the case it is not to be predicted that the concepts, whatever their content, will extend satisfactorily to other determiners or NP types. However it has become standard to extend these notions. Of the two categ...