Definiteness in articleless Slavic languages

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Radek Simik
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 279721764

The project aims to contribute to our understanding of how reference to objects is managed in a linguistic system that lacks one of the core formal instruments, namely articles. More particularly, the project investigates the grammatical category of definiteness in three articleless Slavic languages: Czech, Polish, and Russian. In these languages, it is possible to say the equivalent of "Mary bought book" with the nominal "book" having either a definite or an indefinite interpretation. The main objective of the project is to determine how definiteness is expressed in the absence of articles. The project concentrates on two potentially most systematic means of expressing definiteness: word order and demonstratives. The fact that word order influences the definiteness of articleless nominals (in "Boy arrived", "boy" is more likely to be definite than in "Arrived boy") has typically been attributed to the idea that word order is an exponent of information structure and it is information structure - e.g. the quality of the nominal as informationally old or new - that determines the nominal's (in)definiteness. The project also considers and works out a competing hypothesis that there is a more direct mapping between word order and definiteness, in particular the idea that articleless nominals have a different grammatical representation, depending on their position in the sentence. As regards demonstratives, the project focuses on their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic affinity to definite articles and demonstratives in languages with articles. Demonstratives have been argued to serve two main functions: (i) the expression of a relation to a discourse (or extra-linguistic) referent and (ii) the shift of predicate nominals to individual-denoting nominals (essentially the function of an article). The project investigates the hypothesis that demonstratives in languages with articles are bound to express both functions at the same time, while demonstratives in languages without articles can also express them in isolation. This accounts for the relatively broader distribution of demonstratives in articleless languages. The project further aims to produce novel experimental data by a systematic elicitation of the intuition of a large number of native speakers. The planned experiments will shed new light on the relevant theoretical issues (interpretation and distribution of nominals without articles and with demonstratives) and will contribute new empirical generalizations that can feed further theorizing.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants