Remarks on Definiteness in Warlpiri

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss some rather puzzling facts concerning the semantics of Warlpiri expressions of cardinality, i.e. the Warlpiri counterparts of English expressions like one, two, many, how many. The morphosyntactic evidence, discussed in Section 1, suggests that the corresponding expressions in Warlpiri are nominal, just like the Warlpiri counterparts of prototypical nouns, e.g. child. We also argue that Warlpiri has no articles or any other items of the syntactic category D(eterminer). In Section 2, we describe three types of readings — “definite”, “indefinite” and “predicative” — which are generally found with Warlpiri nouns, including those which correspond to English common nouns and cardinality expressions. A partial analysis of these readings is sketched in Section 3. Since Warlpiri has no determiner system, we hypothesize that the source of (in)definiteness in this language is semantic. More specifically, we suggest that Warlpiri nominals are basically interpreted as individual terms or predicates of individuals and that their three readings arise as a consequence of the interaction of their basic meanings, which are specific to Warlpiri, with certain semantic operations, such as type shifting (Rooth and Partee, 1982; Partee and Rooth, 1983; Partee, 1986, 1987), which universally can or must apply in the process of compositional semantic interpretation.

We wish to thank MarY Laughren, David Nash, Tova Rapoport, Michele Sigler, and Jane Simpson foe Their helpful comments on the first draft of this paper. We also gratefully acknowledge support for this work from the National Science Foundation, companion grants BNS-9108381 and BNS-9108331.