Abstract
This paper highlights the analogy of definiteness and possession by utilising the distinction between semantic and pragmatic uniqueness as outlined in Löbner’s (2011) Concept Type and Determination approach. Assuming, on the basis of the features [\(\pm \) unique] and [\(\pm \) relational], a classification into the four logical types sortal, relational, individual, and functional concept, nouns will be used either in congruence with or deviating from their underlying type. I present evidence from Germanic and Mayan languages for the following claims: (1) noun uses that deviate from the underlying type tend to be reflected by overt morphology; (2) in article split languages, phonologically ‘strong’ forms indicate pragmatic uniqueness, thus, denote a function from [\(-\) unique] to [+ unique], whereas ‘weak’ forms tend to be semantically redundant. Regarding possession, ‘alienable’ morphology denotes a function from non-relational to relational (pragmatic possession), whereas ‘inalienable’ morphology is restricted to semantic possession. Overall, split systems imply a strong correlation between conceptual markedness and morphosyntactic markedness.
The work reported here was carried out in the research Unit FOR 600 Functional concepts and frames, and subsequently in the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 991 The Structure of Representation in Language, Cognition and Science, both sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG). For comments and discussion I would like to thank Adrian Czardybon, Thomas Gamerschlag, Corinna Handschuh, Lisa Hofmann, Sebastian Löbner, and Chris Lucas. Special thanks go to Doris Gerland and Jenny Kohls for their careful and critical reading of an earlier version, and to two anonymous referees for their extremely valuable and detailed comments.
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- 1.
For controversial cases such as ‘configurational uses’ see Löbner (2011: 298) and references there. See also Carlson & Sussman (2005) on ‘weak definites’ such as (go to) the store, as well as Coppock & Beaver (2012) on anti-uniqueness effects of predicative definites and also of argumental definites under negation.
- 2.
In the glosses, I use the following abbreviations of grammatical categories: acc ‘accusative’, aux ‘auxiliary’, comp ‘complementiser’, cop ‘copula’, dat ‘dative’, def ‘definite article’, dem ‘demonstrative pronoun’, derel ‘de-relativisation’, di ‘distal determination’, e ‘ergative’, ep ‘epenthetic consonant’, f ‘feminine’, gen ‘genitive’, imp ‘imperative’, inf ‘infinitive’, loc ‘locative’, m ‘masculine’, n ‘neuter’, neg ‘negation’, nom ‘nominative’, non3rd, ‘1st or 2nd person’, part ‘participle’, past ‘past tense’, pl ‘plural’, poss ‘relation of possession’, posscl ‘possessive classifier’, pres ‘present tense’, refl ‘reflexive pronoun’, rel ‘relative clause marker’, sg ‘singular’, str ‘strong article form’, superl ‘superlative’, wk ‘weak article form’ ; 1, 2 and 3 represent first, second and third person, respectively.
- 3.
In Barker (2011: 1113) this distinction is labelled lexical vs. pragmatic interpretation; see also Vikner & Jensen (2002: 194–216) for a similar though not identical distinction.
- 4.
See Bricker et al. & Po’ot (1998: 358f) for other suffixes with essentially the same function, as well as for further details concerning possession in Yucatec.
- 5.
As in Yucatec, the possessor clitics belong to the ergative paradigm (‘set A’ in the Mayanist tradition).
- 6.
In addition to vowel lengthening, some nouns undergo further regular vowel-related processes when they are possessed (cf. England 1983: 44). For example, the processes involved in n-paatzán=a ‘my sugarcane’ (with the unpossessed variant ptz’on) are stress assignment, prevocalic glottalisation, and reduction of unstressed vowels, hence the phonetic form
.
- 7.
Another instance of de-relationisation comes from Teop (Western-Oceanic, Papua New Guinea). Ulrike Mosel (p.c.) informs me that the suffix -na serves the same function, as in sina-na mother-derel ‘(a) mother’. One more case in question is Cahuilla (Uto-Aztecan; Seiler 1983).
- 8.
Strictly speaking, in the case of FNs (as opposed to RNs) it takes the combination of two shifts to arrive at an SC. One is de-relativisation as in (15), the other is [+ unique] \(\rightarrow \) [\(-\) unique] (‘de-functionalisation’, as it were) and will be briefly touched in 4.2. The effect of the two shifts is represented below in (18).
- 9.
The notion ‘establishing relative clause’ goes back to Hawkins (1978, 138ff.) and will become relevant in 4.4.1. ‘DAA’ represents ‘definite associative anaphora’ (also known as ‘bridging’). Like other anaphora, DAAs are anchored by the referent of a previously mentioned NP; e.g\(\dots a\,house \dots the\,door\dots \). Non-lexical FCs come about by combining nouns (of any type) with ordinals or superlative adjectives and will be discussed in 4.3.1.
- 10.
For these and other criteria see Himmelmann (1997).
- 11.
Besides, there is a special article form that is found with proper names (like in Catalan), and moreover with pronouns. Note that Catalan and Maori are not unusual in featuring so-called preproprial articles. One source of the latter, e.g., in dialects of Norwegian, are third person forms of personal pronouns; cf. Matushansky (2008).
- 12.
An anonymous reviewer (Reviewer 1) raises the question as to the exact nature of such a shift from \(e\) to \(\langle e,t\rangle \); specifically, if one should exclusively think of it as Partee’s (1986) IDENT, in which case there would be a problem with respect to a presupposition of existence (cf. Coppock & Beaver 2012: 533f). Essentially, we are dealing with a variety of shifts of which IDENT is only one. As a matter of fact, Partee (1986: 122) herself proposes another \(e\) to \(\langle e,t\rangle \) shift, labelled PRED, which returns properties from their entity-correlates. One other is, following Löbner (2011: 284f), a shift that is operative with proper names in predicative or indefinite use, as in He’s an Einstein. Yet another instance is a shift from an individual constant into a predicate, by way of making use of its descriptive contents, as it seems to be necessary, e.g., for a moon.
- 13.
An anonymous reviewer (Reviewer 2) rightly points out that underlying SNs such as ‘umbrella’ and ‘dog ’ must be turned into an IC in order for the weak article to be available in cases such as (27). The reviewer asks why this shift is not associated with morphological marking. As a matter of fact, many, if not most, shifting operations are silent rather than overtly marked. Typically, they are lexically restricted and depend on world knowledge, as in the case of ‘weak definites’ ; other instances are IN \(\rightarrow \) SC shifts as discussed in note 13 and cases of polysemy. It appears that with regar to operations among nominal concept types, only the most productive ones tend to be overt. Note that these are mainly the ones that rely on contextual rather than lexical information: the appropriate context to identify the antecedent of an anaphoric NP (SC \(\rightarrow \) IC) or a non-lexical POSS relation (SN \(\rightarrow \) RC). Similarly, existential binding, which is involved in the operation [+relational] \(\rightarrow \) [-relational], does not require lexical information either. More discussion of the shifting operations in detail is found in Löbner (2011: 310–312).
- 14.
Thanks to Adrian Czardybon for providing the glosses for the examples from Sorbian.
- 15.
In contrast to Upper Silesian, in Upper Sorbian the article is also obligatory with non-lexical functional concepts (i.e., ICs and FCs that come about by ordinal numbers and superlatives, which comprises a function over the domain that is characterised by the noun predicate), provided the NP is the comment rather than the topic of the clause. Similarly, associative anaphora (DAAs) tend to be generally preceded by the article in Upper Sorbian (Breu 2004: 20, 41), whereas in Upper Silesian this tends to be restricted to part-whole DAAs Czardybon (2010: 30ff, 2014: 309ff). What this shows with respect to the language-specific cut-off points on the scale (19) is that for Upper Sorbian the obligatory use of articles is two steps further advanced than in Upper Silesian.
- 16.
The example (31) is an excerpt from spontaneous conversation among two elderly dialect speakers, recorded and transcribed by Jennifer Kohls. I would like to thank her for permitting me to quote her data.
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Ortmann, A. (2015). Uniqueness and Possession: Typological Evidence for Type Shifts in Nominal Determination. In: Aher, M., Hole, D., Jeřábek, E., Kupke, C. (eds) Logic, Language, and Computation. TbiLLC 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8984. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46906-4_14
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