When: Wednesday, May 22, 2024, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PMWhere: Arts Two 2.17 and online, Mile End campus
Workshop 3: (In)definiteness in Article-less Languages and Article Use in New Englishes
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Many languages, including the most familiar Indo-European languages, have article systems. The division of labor between the definite and the indefinite article has posed a real challenge for formal accounts. Given the complexity of article systems, the fact that as many languages lack either one or both articles poses interesting questions for universal grammar. Do article-less languages have the same expressive power as articled languages? And if they do, why do languages develop articles at all?
A standard view about languages without articles is that they are ambiguous between +/- definite or between +/-specific. We claim that bare singulars in such languages indeed are +definite, but they are not -definite. Their apparent indefinite readings arise from their status as (plural) kind terms or from pseudo-incorporation or some other external process.
Drawing on languages like Hindi and Russian, which have number specification in the noun phrase but no articles, and focusing specifically on bare singulars we show the following:
As we know, English definites have two facets to their profile: uniqueness and familiarity. Singular terms that represent novel discourse entities require the indefinite article, regardless of whether or not their nominal complements satisfy uniqueness. Hindi and Russian bare singulars, on the other hand, require their nominal complement to be a singleton. That is, they impose a requirement on the size of their complement set but they do not require them to satisfy familiarity. This explains some of the indefinite uses of bare singulars that have been noted in the literature. They are, in effect, novel definites: this justifies treating them as +definite.
What about their status as -definite? An interesting test case is the behavior of Hindi and Russian bare singulars inside islands. We know that English indefinites can take narrow or exceptional wide scope out of the antecedent of conditionals, for example. Hindi and Russian bare singulars cannot. The uniqueness requirement of their nominal complements projects globally, resulting in a reading that is distinct from that of English indefinites. That is, they are not specific indefinites but even more interestingly, they are not non-specific indefinites either. A similar effect is seen with bare singulars embedded under negation, another well-known hole for presuppositions.
I use the theoretical lens that treats bare singulars as +definite (not -definite, not +/- specific) to evaluate evidence from L2 acquisition of articles by article-less L1 speakers and articles in New Englishes based on article-less languages, such as South Asian Englishes. The literature provides much evidence for bare singulars (article drop) but typically such cases involve direct objects. We know that the direct objects are susceptible to pseudo-incorporation, a phenomenon known to bleed definiteness, familiarity as well as uniqueness. There remain, however, some interesting cases of article drop, a proper account of which may well provide a window into what is distinctive about article systems in New Englishes.