Definiteness in Chiyao

Double definiteness in Scandinavian

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...

Definiteness and implicatures in Tagalog∗

The use of an indefinite NP often implies that the NP’s descriptive content is instantiated by more than one individual. But do indefinites conventionally signal this notion of nonuniqueness or does nonuniqueness arise pragmatically, via reasoning about scalar alternatives? In this paper I argue that in Tagalog, indefinite bare NP patients are only able to implicate nonuniqueness if there is a ...

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...

Crosslinguistic Notions of (In)definiteness

We argue that both Russellian and Heimian definites exist in natural languages. Our account captures both the commonality and difference between the two. Further, we suggest that the Russel-lian/Heimian distinction extends to indefinites too.