One of the major problems when translating from Japanese into a European language such as German or English is to determine definiteness of noun phrases in order to choose the correct determiner in the target language. Even though in Japanese, noun phrase reference is said to depend in large parts on the discourse context, we show that in many cases there also exist linguistic markers for defin...

This paper discusses grammatical gender in Norwegian by bringing together data from first language acquisition, heritage language, and dialect change. In all these contexts, is often claimed to be a vulnerable category, arguably due the relative non-transparency of assignment. Furthermore, feminine process being lost many dialects, as agreement forms (for example, indefinite article) are merged...

This paper examines the status of so-called ‘pleonastic’ determiners, focusing on the plural definite generic common in Romance languages. It is noted that every language has generic or kind-denoting terms but such terms vary between bare and definite (rather than indefinite) forms across languages. Canonical and non-canonical uses of definite determiners are distinguished and language variatio...

The present article aims to provide a synchronic study of the inflectional or morpho-syntactic categories of noun in Sistani dialect. These categories comprise person, number, gender or noun class, definiteness, case, and possession. Linguistic data was collected via recording free speech, and interviewing with 30 (15 females, 15 males) illiterate Sistani language consultants of age 40–102 year...

Contributors: Michael Lewis Schneir (author), Wendy Kingdom (section editor), Amy Wheareat editor)

This study investigated the relative effects of deductive and inductive form-focused instruction (FFI) on the acquisition of 4 non-generic definite article uses(cultural, situational, structural, and textual) as assessed by explicit and implicit outcome measures. The tests utilized to assess EFL learners' acquisition of definite article uses were timed and untimed grammaticality judgment tests....

The matrix equation X + ATX−1A = Q has been studied extensively when A and Q are real square matrices and Q is symmetric positive definite. The equation has positive definite solutions under suitable conditions, and in that case the solution of interest is the maximal positive definite solution. The same matrix equation plays an important role in Green’s function calculations in nano research, ...