Classifiers and the definite article in Indonesian
Carol Rose Little, Ekarina Winarto
October 2019 

It has been said that languages with classifiers do not have overt definite articles (Chierchia 1998, Bošković 2008). Indonesian, however, is typologically rare in that it has both classifiers (Chung 2000, Sneddon 2010) and a definite article (Macdonald 1976, Rubin 2010, Winarto 2016). Classifiers in Indonesian appear with numerals but even then the classifier is optional. The fact that the classifier in Indonesian is optional has been noted by various authors (Chung 2000, Sneddon 2010, Dalrymple & Mofu 2012), but much of this discussion is on the distribution of classifiers and plural marking. Our paper builds on Winarto (2016)’s observation that a classifier cannot co-occur with the definite article -nya. When the classifier is not present, the definite article with the numeral and noun is grammatical. We propose an analysis to account for the following: (i) classifiers occur with numerals; (ii) NPs with classifiers are always indefinite; and (iii) classifiers and the definite article cannot co-occur.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/004808 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear in the Proceedings of the Forty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 49)
keywords:	classifiers, austronesian, indonesian, definiteness, numerals, semantics, syntax
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