Articulated definiteness without articles

Many of the world’s languages lack direct translations of definite articles in English, allowing bare nouns or other nominal expressions in definite contexts. Because articles are taken to head a DP projection in languages that have them (Abney 1987; Szabolcsi 1994), an attractive analysis of languages without definite articles is that they lack a DP projection, a perspective recently advocated at length by Boškovic̀ (2008, 2012). Such ‘NP-analyses’ have been proposed for numeral classifier languages like Mandarin (e.g. Chierchia 1998; Boškovic̀ and Hsieh 2012; Cheng 2013) and Japanese (e.g. Fukui and Takano 2000), where bare nouns can receive definite interpretations. Others have claimed that numeral classifiers themselves serve some of the functions of definite articles (Cheng and Sybesma 1999, 2012), while others maintain a DP analysis for languages without articles by assumption (Simpson 2005; Wu and Bodomo 2009). Previous work has shown that numeral classifier languages are not uniform in the expression of definiteness, a complication for any of these views. In their landmark paper on noun phrases and definiteness in Chinese, Cheng and Sybesma (1999) observe that while Mandarin uses bare nouns in definite subject and object position, Cantonese makes use of [Clf+N] phrases, their name for Clf-N sequences: