Definiteness across languages

Ana Aguilar-Guevara Julia Pozas Loyo Violeta Vázquez-Rojas Maldonado

Synopsis

Definiteness has been a central topic in theoretical semantics since its modern foundation. However, despite its significance, there has been surprisingly scarce research on its cross-linguistic expression. With the purpose of contributing to filling this gap, the present volume gathers thirteen studies exploiting insights from formal semantics and syntax, typological and language specific studies, and, crucially, semantic fieldwork and cross-linguistic semantics, in order to address the expression and interpretation of definiteness in a diverse group of languages, most of them understudied. The papers presented in this volume aim to establish a dialogue between theory and data in order to answer the following questions: What formal strategies do natural languages employ to encode definiteness? What are the possible meanings associated to this notion across languages? Are there different types of definite reference? Which other functions (besides marking definite reference) are associated with definite descriptions? Each of the papers contained in this volume addresses at least one of these questions and, in doing so, they aim to enrich our understanding of definiteness.

Chapters

Definiteness across languages
An overview

Ana Aguilar-Guevara, Julia Pozas Loyo, Violeta Vázquez-Rojas Maldonado

Preface
Weak vs. strong definite articles
Meaning and form across languages

Florian Schwarz

Chapter 1
Definiteness in Cuevas Mixtec

Carlos Cisneros

Chapter 2
Strong vs. weak definites
Evidence from Lithuanian adjectives

Milena Šereikaitė

Chapter 3
On (in)definite expressions in American Sign Language

Ava Irani

Chapter 4
A nascent definiteness marker in Yokot’an Maya

Maurice Pico

Chapter 5
Definiteness across languages and in L2 acquisition

Bert Le Bruyn

Chapter 6
Licensing D in classifier languages and “numeral blocking”

David Hall

Chapter 7
On kinds and anaphoricity in languages without definite articles

Miloje Despić

Chapter 8
Definiteness in Russian bare nominal kinds

Olga Borik, M. Teresa Espinal

Chapter 9
A morpho-semantic account of weak definites and Bare Institutional Singulars in English

Adina Williams

Chapter 10
Is the weak definite a generic?
An experimental investigation

Thaís Maira Machado de Sá, Greg N. Carlson, Maria Luiza Cunha Lima, Michael K. Tanenhaus

Chapter 11
Most vs. the most in languages where the more means most

Elizabeth Coppock, Linnea Strand

Chapter 12
Definiteness, partitivity, and domain restriction
A fresh look at definite reduplication

Urtzi Etxeberria, Anastasia Giannakidou

Chapter 13

Ana Aguilar-Guevara

Ana Aguilar-Guevara has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Utrecht University. She currently works as an assistant professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Her research focuses on semantic and pragmatic phenomena in natural language, such as weak referentiality, peculiar definite and indefinite noun phrases, and meaning enrichment.

Julia Pozas Loyo

Julia Pozas Loyo obtained her PhD at Queen Mary University of London. She is currently is an Associate Professor at El Colegio de México and she also teaches at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her work has focused on the development of determiners, particularly in Old Spanish. Her main research interests include grammaticalization, the semantics of determiners, (in)definiteness, and the history of Romance Languages.

Violeta Vázquez-Rojas Maldonado

Violeta Vázquez Rojas Maldonado has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from New York University. She is an associate professor at the Center for Literary and Linguistic Studies from El Colegio de México. Her research centers on semantic fieldwork and the semantics and morphosyntax of noun phrases in under-represented languages, particularly Mexican Spanish and Purépecha.

Reviews

Review on LinguistList by Justin Case published April 7, 2021
[...] This volume presents a collection of high-quality articles that touch on various aspects of definiteness marking and/or interpretation without significant overlap in theoretical or methodological orientation, or the languages they study. On the one hand, the diversity of materials and analyses found in this work reflects the underlying variation found in definiteness marking across natural languages, and across the field of linguistics generally. For instance, just as Despic (Chapter 8) adopts the position that bare nouns are always NPs, and not DPs, Borik and Espinal (Chapter 9) provide ample evidence for certain bare nouns (at least in Russian) to behave like full DPs with a silent article. The fact that two competing positions are advocated in the same volume can be enlightening to scholars aiming at a holistic understanding of the approaches in the literature. In addition, taken together, the papers in this volume demonstrate the need to go beyond our preconceptions, particularly those associated with our methodological orientations, in order to address syntactic, semantic and functional subtleties regarding definiteness and to get the facts straight.[...]