Definiteness across languages
Ana Aguilar-Guevara, Julia Loyo, Violeta Vázquez-Rojas Maldonado, Florian Schwarz, Carlos Cisneros, Milena Šereikaitė, Ava Irani, Maurice Pico, Bert Bruyn, David Hall, Miloje Despić, Olga Borik, Teresa Espinal, Adina Williams, Thaís de Sá, Gregory Carlson, Maria Luiza Cunha Lima, Michael K. Tanenhaus, Elizabeth Coppock, Linnea Strand, Urtzi Etxeberria, Anastasia Giannakidou
October 2018 

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.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/004290 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To be published by Language Science Press
keywords:	definiteness, indefiniteness, weak vs. strong definite articles, number, bare nouns, definite generics, weak definites, superlatives, partitivity, classifiers, kinds, anaphoricity, domain restriction, adjectives, definite reduplication., semantics, morphology, syntax
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