In many languages, the indefinite article emerges from the numeral ONE. In the course of its diachronic development it acquires additional functions such as marking of specificity and genericity. Thus, different functions of indefinite articles can be seen as stages in the process of grammaticalization. This paper examines the use of edin in Bulgarian as a marker of indefiniteness. It shows tha...

In this paper we parallelly build up the theories of normed linear spaces and of linear spaces with indefinite metric, called also Minkowski spaces for finite dimensions in the literature. In the first part of this paper we collect the common properties of the semi-and indefinite-inner-products and define the semi-indefinite-inner-product and the corresponding structure, the semi-indefinite-inn...

Indefinite NPs in shared constituents in coordinative structures in German exhibit different referential options with respect to scope and specificity. These options are restricted by the informational status of the indefinite: A focused indefinite NP can receive all referential options, while a non-focused one can only get the narrow scope non-specific reading. Our analysis assumes that the in...

This study aims at identifying the kinds of errors that Iraqi FEL Non-departmental undergraduates made in the use of definite and indefinite articles . These errors are: (1) deletion of the indefinite article (2) substitution of the indefinite for the definite article (3) substitution of the definite for the indefinite article (4) substitution of a for an. Native language transfer was found to ...

We examine the distribution and interpretation of post-copular noun phrases in French when they appear with and without an indefinite article (Marie est (une) physicienne). We propose that the alternation is due to the fact that the indefinite article marks saturation of an NP-internal argument slot, and show that because of this, post-copular indefinite NPs are usually but not always existenti...

This paper presents several basic results on compiling indefinite and GCWA(Generalized Closed World Assumption) inference in IDDB(Indefinite Dedutive Databases). We do not allow function symbols, but do allow non-Horn clauses. Further, although the GCWA is used to derive negative assumptions, we do also allow negative clauses to occur explicitly. We show a fundamental relationship between indef...

There are various notions of specificity, ranging from Fodor & Sag’s (1982) referentiality view to Givón’s (1983) discourse prominence view. Ionin (2006) discusses the relation between these two perspectives by analyzing the English indefinite this. She represents indefinite this as a referential operator in the sense of Fodor & Sag (1982), but also adds the felicity condition of “noteworthines...

We present a declarative framework for updating views over indefinite databases, that is, databases with null values. The framework follows the standard database approach, which allows for a unique null constant. As the main contributions of the paper, we introduce the concept of an indefinite deductive database as a formal representation of a view over an indefinite database, propose a semanti...