[Lingtyp] Optional determination?

[Juergen Bohnemeyer]

Dear all — I’m wondering to what extent it makes sense to talk about determiners and determination as a grammatical process in languages in which the would-be determiners are syntactically optional. In other words, is there such a thing as optional determination?

Consider for example Russian:


(1)                  Я прочитал эту зеленую книгу

‘I read this green book’

(2)                  Я прочитал зеленую книгу

‘I read a/the green book

(3)                  *Я прочитал зеленую эту книгу

Argument positions can be filled by non-maximal projections* as in (2), unlike in Germanic and Romance, so that can’t be a basis for talking about determination in Russian. But what about (3)? Despite Russian having fairly free word order, the order in (3) seems all but ungrammatical. But is it parsimonious to invoke determination to account for this ordering constraint? Has anybody looked into this, in Russian or any other language without obligatory determination, or found any other kind of (strictly empirical) evidence of a categorical difference between maximal and non-maximal nominal projections in such languages?

(*I’m looking at this in theory-neutral terms, so I’m disregarding here the DP analysis.)

Thanks! – Juergen



Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

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