Definiteness Subcategorized in Discourse: Lakhota ku

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...

The Productivity of Infixation in Lakhota*

A growing body of work on morphological irregularity has shown that the productivity of irregular morphological processes is sensitive to phonological context. However, these studies have focused almost exclusively on patterns of irregularity found in European languages. In this paper, I discuss a typologically different pattern of irregularity found in Lakhota: person marking appears as a pref...

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 ...