DP and mandatory determiners in article-less Serbo-Croatian

Although it lacks grammaticalized categories of definite and indefinite articles and its “bare” nouns are (usually) ambiguous between a definite and indefinite interpretation, Serbo-Croatian has appropriate lexical items for marking discourse-old and discourse-new nominal referents. I demonstrate th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Acta linguistica academica 2017-06, Vol.64 (2), p.257-279
Main Author: Stanković, Branimir
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Determiners
Discourse markers
Lexicon
Noun phrases
Philology
Reference (Semantic)
Serbo-Croatian language
South Slavic Languages
Theoretical Linguistics
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Description
Summary:Although it lacks grammaticalized categories of definite and indefinite articles and its “bare” nouns are (usually) ambiguous between a definite and indefinite interpretation, Serbo-Croatian has appropriate lexical items for marking discourse-old and discourse-new nominal referents. I demonstrate that there are contexts in which use of these discourse markers is obligatory for obtaining the intended reading, as the “bare” nominal phrase would unambiguously be interpreted as definite or indefinite, depending on the context. More importantly, when present, these discourse markers block left branch and adjunct extractions from the rest of the NP, indicating that a determiner phrase might be projected, even in an article less language.
ISSN:2559-8201
2560-1016
DOI:10.1556/2062.2017.64.2.5