In classifier languages, a classifier is often used with a numeral; for instance, to count numbers of items. However, there are also cases in which a classifier is used without a numeral, such as [CLF+N]. The interpretation of a [CLF+N] construction varies. Generally, it is interpreted as definite in subject position, and indefinite in object position. This observation has widely been reported in many dialects spoken in southern China, like Yue and Wu.
The definite reading created in [CLF+N] constructions is derived from movement of the noun to Clo, where an iota operator is inserted, and where it is proposed that the nominal phrase in Chinese has a [ClP[NP]] structure. The definite reading of the [CLF+N] construction noun movement happens in Cantonese Yue, while in Mandarin Chinese this is not possible, since the movement of the noun to the head is blocked for reasons that are not clear.
Another approach to deal with the case is to propose a [DP[ClP[NP]]] structure, in which there is a DP projection with a null D, and the classifier is a quasi-definite article with the meaning of “identifiability” or “familiarity.” The definite reading is related to information structure and to context-dependency. This observation is also made in Lianjiang, where a [CLF+N] construction can be interpreted as definite in object position of a control verb or, when it functions as a defective or beneficial theme, the definiteness in such constructions is affected by both syntax and context.
The [CLF+N] construction is also observed in Xiang. However, the interpretation and distribution of such constructions is different from those observed in Yue and Wu. Specifically, in Xiang, the [CLF+N] construction can: (a) appear in subject and object position, (b) follow a pronoun/proper name [pronoun/proper name+[CLF+N]], (c) precede a proper noun [CLF+proper noun], and (d) appear in a topic position. In subject position, it can be interpreted as either definite or generic; in object position, it can be interpreted as definite and nonspecific. In a topic position, it can be interpreted as either definite or generic. When it follows a pronoun or proper name, the interpretation is ambiguous between a definite reading and a nonspecific reading. Factors like syntactic position, verb properties, aspect, and telicity all affect the interpretation of the [CLF+N] construction.
The data in Xiang can be accounted for with the structure [DP[ClP[N]]] proposed in the literature. That is, there is a null D in the nominal structure in Xiang. In the process of derivation, the classifier moves up to the null D to check the definite feature in D. The noun moves to the head classifier position after the classifier has moved up; otherwise, it stays in situ if a numeral blocks the movement.
Article
The Semantics and Syntax of the Nominal Construction in Chinese Xiang
Man Lu, Yi Zhen, Ma Yu, and Li Shihui
Article
Morphology in Uralic Languages
Anna Sőrés and Krisztina Hevér-Joly
Uralic languages are synthetic, agglutinative languages, overwhelmingly suffixing, and they have a rich inflectional morphology in both the nominal and the verbal domain. The Uralic family includes about 30 languages spoken in Europe and in North Eurasia and is traditionally divided into two branches: Finno-Ugric and Samoyed languages. The separation of the branches and subgroups is very distant in time; thus, these general morphological features show a notable variation.
Agglutinating is a general feature but there are some syncretisms, fusions, and suppletions and all languages have postpositions beside suffixes and some of them have prepositions.
Nouns and pronouns are inflected for number (singular, plural, and in some languages for dual), person, and case but not for gender. All Uralic languages have a case system. However, the number and the nature of the cases show a great variety: from 3 to 18 cases including grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, and genitive) and other spatial and non-spatial cases. A characteristic feature of these languages is the tripartite location system. The system of personal possessive markers is particularly interesting: the person and the number of the possessor and the number of the item possessed can be marked by suffixes. Combining the expression of possession and case, the morphotactic rules differ between the languages. Comparative and superlative adjectives can be also formed by inflection.
Verbs are inflected for person/number, tense, and mood. Uralic languages generally do not have the canonical passive voice. A characteristic feature of Ugric languages is the double conjugation of transitive verbs depending on the definiteness of the direct object. As verbal aspect is not an inflectional category, certain languages use a rich system of preverbs or derivational suffixes to express aspect and Aktionsart.
Article
Indefinite Articles in the Romance Languages
Julia Pozas Loyo
A common feature of Romance languages is the existence of indefinite articles. Prototypically, indefinite articles serve to introduce new referents into discourse, which can later be taken up by means of a definite. In Romance languages, the diachronic source of indefinite articles is the unitary cardinal ‘one’ and in most cases the singular indefinite article is formally identical to the numeral: Ast., Sp., Cat., Occ., It., Srd. un/una; Pt. um/uma; Glc. un/unha; Fr. un/une; RaeR. en/ena; Ro. un/o. Despite their formal identity to the unitary cardinal, these forms are considered indefinite articles since they can be used in generic and predicative nominals, the two contexts that characterize the last stages of the grammaticalization of indefinite articles. As for plurals, there are two possible diachronic sources. On one hand, Gallo-Romance languages and some varieties of Italo-Romance (i.e., Tuscan and northern Italian dialects) have grammaticalized a plural marker of indefiniteness on the basis of the preposition de, di (< lat. de) plus the definite article (e.g., Fr. des; It. dei/delle/degli). On the other hand, Ibero-Romance and neighboring languages derive their simple indefinite plural marker from the plural forms of the Latin cardinal (i.e., acc.pl. unos, unas): Pt. uns/umas; Glc. uns/unhas; Ast. unos/unes; Sp. unos/unas; and Cat. uns/unes. Romanian also preserves a plural form derived from Lat. unos, unas: for the nom.acc
unii/unele, and gen.dat. unor. More commonly, however, plural indefinites are left bare or are preceded by nişte ‘some’ or câţiva ‘several.’
The use of the plural indefinite article in Romance is less extended than that of its singular counterpart. In fact, except for French where the obligatoriness of the determiner has been linked to the severe loss of morphological number, plural indefinite count nouns can, under certain circumstances, remain bare. Finally, in diachrony, the grammaticalization of plural indefinite articles is behind that of the singular. Synchronically, this is reflected in at least two facts: first, the frequency of use and the degree of obligatoriness of the plural indefinite articles are significantly lower than that of the singular indefinite article; second, plural indefinite articles are normally not accepted in generics.
Article
Determiners
Phoevos Panagiotidis
Determiners are a nominal syntactic category distinct from both adjectives and nouns; they constitute a functional (aka closed or ‘minor’) category and they are typically located high inside the nominal phrasal structure.
From a syntactic point of view, the category of determiners is commonly understood to comprise the word classes of article, demonstrative, and quantifier, as well as non-adjectival possessives and some nominal agreement markers.
From a semantic point of view, determiners are assumed to function as quantifiers, especially within research informed by Generalized Quantifier Theory. However, this is a one-way entailment: although determiners in natural language are quantificational, their class contains only a subset of the logically possible quantifiers; this class is restricted by conservativity and other factors.
The tension between the ‘syntactic’ and the ‘semantic’ perspective on determiners results to a degree of terminological confusion: it is not always clear which lexical items the Determiner category includes or what the function of determiners is; moreover, there exists a tendency among syntacticians to view ‘Determiner’ as naming not a class, but a fixed position within a nominal phrasal template.
The study of determiners rose to prominence within grammatical theory during the ’80s both due to advances in semantic theorizing, primarily Generalized Quantifier Theory, and due to the generalization of the X' phrasal schema to functional (minor) categories. Some issues in the nature and function of determiners that have been addressed in theoretical and typological work with considerable success include the categorial status of determiners, their (non-)universality, their structural position and feature makeup, their role in argumenthood and their interaction with nominal predicates, and their relation to pronouns. Expectedly, issues in (in)definiteness, quantification, and specificity also figure prominently in research work on determiners.
Article
Chinese Cleft Sentences
Yuli Feng
Chinese clefts mainly involve two patterns, the shi…de pattern and the bare shi pattern, and the shi…de pattern can be further categorized into the V–O–de pattern and the V–O–de pattern, which are distinguished according to the relative order of the object and de. Compared to clefts in other languages, Chinese clefts are particularly special in two aspects. First, in the surface order, the cleft focus stays together with the cleft presupposition between shi and de, instead of moving to a higher position as in languages like English. Second, Chinese shi…de clefts have a heavy preference for past-tense interpretations and the V–de–O pattern cannot host tense, aspect and modal elements in its presupposition.
In the existing literature, some analyses take shi to be the central element of focus-marking, which partitions cleft sentences into the cleft focus and the cleft presupposition; while other analyses relate shi in clefts with shi in idenitificational/specificational sentences and pin down shi as a copula verb. For de, a group of studies treat it to be an optional element that serves a secondary function such as mood-marking or tense-marking; while other analyses, taking the shi…de pattern to be prototypical clefts that encode contrastiveness or exhaustivity, tend to assign de the function of focus partition and treat shi as a semantically vacuous copula verb. The TAM restriction is then explained by assigning de the syntactic position of a tense/aspect head or by ascribing such restrictions to PF-level linearization constraints and the implied default temporal interpretation of the cleft construction.
Semantically, just like English it-clefts, the existence/absence of the exhaustive effect in Chinese clefts is a much-debated issue that has generated competing views. Some studies distinguish between emphatic and exhaustive meanings, and treat exhaustivity as the defining criterion for cleft sentences in Chinese, while others hold that Chinese clefts only encode contrastiveness and do not mark exhaustivity at the level of assertion.
Article
Nominal Inflectional Morphology in Germanic: Nouns
Christian Zimmer
The modern Germanic languages encode up to three categories on nouns: number (with the values singular and plural), case (with up to four values: nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive), and definiteness (with the values definite and indefinite). The variation within this branch of the Indo-European language family is immense: While, for example, Icelandic encodes all three categories and all the values mentioned, English differentiates only between singular and plural via the inflection of nouns. Such differences in the number of categories that are encoded on nouns are due to the grammaticalization of postnominal articles into bound definiteness markers in the North Germanic languages, which has not taken place in the other Germanic languages, and the loss of case (e.g., in English and most, but not all, other Germanic languages). Furthermore, Germanic languages differ greatly in how number and case are encoded. Firstly, the coding techniques suffixation, stem modulation, subtraction, tone, and combinations of these techniques (plus zero marking) vary in frequency across the languages at hand. Secondly, case and number can be expressed within a cumulative formative (this is the case in Icelandic and Faroese) or with the help of separate formatives. Thirdly, the extent to which allomorphy can be observed varies considerably—ranging from virtually no allomorphy in English (with -s and phonologically determined variants as the only formative) to intricate systems in Icelandic and Faroese. And fourthly, allomorphs are assigned according to different principles, with phonology (both segmental and suprasegmental), semantics, and grammatical gender being of varying importance.
Article
Norwegian
Agnete Nesse
Norwegian is mainly spoken in Norway and is represented in writing by two written languages, Bokmål (90%) and Nynorsk (10%). Both would work well as a written standard for the whole country but are to some extent regionally distributed. The distribution is partly based on the dialects and their likeness to one of the two written standards, and partly on tradition and ideology. There is no codified standard spoken Norwegian, so in formal settings the choice is either to approximate to one of the written standards, or to simply use dialect, which is most often the case.
Norwegian is part of the Scandinavian dialect continuum. Due to geography and historical developments in the region, most Norwegians easily understand spoken Swedish but sometimes struggle with written Swedish. Conversely, they easily understand written Danish but sometimes struggle with spoken Danish. Einar Haugen pinned the term Semi Communication to the almost mutual understanding between speakers of Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish. Between Norwegian and the insular Nordic varieties Icelandic and Faroese, there is no mutual intelligibility.
Norwegian has both synthetic and analytic language characteristics. Grammatical meaning is partly conveyed morphologically by endings and partly syntactically through word order. The vocabulary is, apart from a group of loanwords from Greek and Latin, almost solely Germanic. Due to the influence from German (Low and High), Danish, and English, parts of Norwegian vocabulary will be recognizable to speakers of other Germanic varieties. The influence caused by the century-long language contact between Sami, Finnish, and Norwegian has not led to great changes in the vocabulary, but, regionally, dialects have changed due to this contact. The part of Norwegian vocabulary that has been retained from Old Norse is to some degree recognizable to modern speakers, but Old Norse as such is not comprehensible to a modern Norwegian reader.
Typical grammatical features of Norwegian are
1. A relatively homogenous vowel inventory of nine vowels, and a heterogenous consonant system in which the dialects differ between 17 and more than 25 different phonemes.
2. Two distinctive tonemes in most dialects.
3. Suffixed definite article.
4. V2 word order
Article
Differential Object Marking in the Romance Languages
David Paul Gerards
In its most narrow sense, differential object marking (henceforth DOM) refers to a state of affairs in which a proper subset of direct objects of a given language receives overt marking by a morpheme A, while the complementary proper subset of direct objects either does not receive any such marking at all or receives overt marking by another morpheme B. DOM is triggered by (usually a complex interplay of) object-related features, such as animacy, referentiality, and topicality, as well as by additional verbal and configurational ones, such as telicity and secondary predication, among others. Further features determining the extension of DOM are transitivity, affectedness, and individuation. Documented in many language families, DOM is also firmly anchored in Romance. Its prenominal nature shows that it is yet another instantiation of the typological change from primarily right-headed Classical Latin to primarily left-headed Romance. Romance varieties differ as to the degree of grammaticalization of DOM. Among the “big five” national languages, only Spanish and Romanian display a well-developed DOM-system (realized by a and pe, respectively). Yet, a pan-Romance look reveals that DOM is also well attested in Asturian, many Italo-Romance dialects (e.g., Corsican, Engadinese Romansh, Sardinian, Sicilian, Southern Italian), and even some Gallo-Romance varieties (e.g., Gascon and Languedocian). These latter partly use DOM-morphemes (henceforth DOM-m; within glosses, DOM reads “direct object marker”) different from a and pe and, in addition, in part display a complementary distribution of DOM and definite articles. Generally speaking, Romance DOM is on the rise, in the sense that it arose with dislocated, topicalized strong personal pronouns in Late Latin and has since been diachronically expanding along typologically well-established pathways. Such processes continue to be visible in a number of contemporary Romance varieties, among which are Argentinian Spanish and some non-prescriptive registers of Galician and Catalan. The potential sensitivity of DOM to language contact is also evinced by some Italian and French regiolects in contact with varieties making wider use of DOM. At the same time, DOM-grammaticalization may be reversible: Cuban and Dominican Spanish, for instance, have been reported to display receding DOM; the same is true of Spanish in a number of language contact and heritage speaker settings and of post-18th-century Portuguese. Even Standard Italian, Northern Italian dialects, Standard French, and Francoprovençal—often argued not to possess DOM at all—do marginally allow for it with dislocated strong first- and second-person personal pronouns.
Article
Morphology of Determiners in the Romance Languages
Franck Floricic
The question of articles and definiteness has given rise to a great deal of work, whether from a theoretical, typological, historical, or other perspective. Given the breadth of the field, it would be unrealistic in a synthesis of this kind to go through all the work that has been done on this subject, some of which may be relatively old. We have therefore focused on a certain number of aspects which seemed relevant to us, taking into consideration dialectal data which are not often taken into account. Another difficulty of the undertaking is that the question of articles concerns various fields of investigation: syntax, semantics, phonology, and morphology. The focus of this contribution is therefore on the morphology of articles in Romance languages. After having sought to circumscribe the concept of determination, the origin and distribution of articles in a number of Romance varieties are described. Particular attention is paid to the phenomena of variation that manifest themselves at the phonomorphological level. The morpho-syntax of other kinds of determiners is discussed as well—demonstratives, quantifiers, and possessives. The question of the maintenance of case distinctions in the Romance determiners will also be addressed, as well as the discussed and intriguing question of lack of agreement within the noun phrase. Given their special status, it will be shown that personal and place names show particular constraints with respect to definite articles, due among other things to their historical genesis.
