32.1223, Review: Semantics: Aguilar-Guevara, Pozas Loyo, Vázquez-Rojas Maldonado (2019)

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Subject: 32.1223, Review: Semantics: Aguilar-Guevara, Pozas Loyo, Vázquez-Rojas Maldonado (2019)

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Date: Tue, 06 Apr 2021 23:14:00
From: Justin Case [jcase058 at uottawa.ca]
Subject: Definiteness across languages

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-3150.html

EDITOR: Ana  Aguilar-Guevara
EDITOR: Julia  Pozas Loyo
EDITOR: Violeta  Vázquez-Rojas Maldonado
TITLE: Definiteness across languages
SERIES TITLE: Studies in Diversity Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Language Science Press
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Justin Thomas Case, University of Ottawa

SUMMARY

The works that make up ‘Definiteness across languages’, edited by Ana
Aguilar-Guevara, Julia Pozas Loyo and Viola Vázquez-Rojas Maldonado, were
selected from presentations given at the workshop with the same name held on
23-25 June 2016 in Mexico City. As the name suggests, these papers are united
by their commitment to broadening our knowledge regarding the expression of
definiteness and the interpretation thereof in natural languages, both spoken
and signed. ‘Definiteness across languages’ aims to provide a balanced
exposition of theoretically-, experimentally- and descriptively-oriented
accounts of definiteness systems spanning a typologically diverse sample of
the world’s languages. 

The volume comprises three sections. The first section pertains to
definiteness marking systems in a number of natural languages and the semantic
primitives that drive these systems. The second section considers the
syntactic locus of definiteness markers and their interaction with other
material projected within the nominal domain. The final section presents
studies demonstrating uses of definite markers which exceed their classical
functions of marking uniqueness and/or familiarity.  

The first collection of papers opens with Chapter 1, a work by Florian Schwarz
(‘Weak and strong definite articles: Meaning and form across languages’) that
elaborates upon conclusions drawn in his prolific thesis (Schwarz 2009),
namely that many languages morphologically distinguish between a so-called
weak definite, signalling that a referent is unique, and a strong definite,
which refers to an anaphorically-accessible entity. He also observes that
strong definite markers tend to be more phonologically complex than their weak
counterparts. In this contribution, the author refines his original findings
with additional facts drawn from a diverse sample of languages – including
Hausa, Lakhota, Icelandic, Mauritian and Haitian Creole, etc., demonstrating
more fine-grained semantic and distributional asymmetries between strong and
weak definite markers. With this data in hand, the author contrasts the
appropriateness of a conception of the weak vs. strong distinction as a binary
contrast with a more scalar conception of definiteness encoding with
uniqueness and anaphoricity at either end of the scale. As in the case of many
other topics in the typological literature, the ‘discrete vs. scalar’ debate
is highly relevant to any scholar taking definiteness marking seriously.  

In Chapter 2, ‘Definiteness in Cuevas Mixtec’, Carlos Cisneros discusses a
system of definiteness marking that seemingly fits the Schwarz (2009) weak vs.
strong observation. In the case of Cuevas Mixtec, typically, bare nouns are
interpreted as unique, whereas anaphoric definites are marked with an article
derived from a classifier. However, nouns fall into one of three natural
classes: (i) regular nouns following the pattern outlined above, (ii) nouns
that are overtly marked in both unique and anaphoric environments, and (iii)
nouns that cannot be marked with the article in question. The author clarifies
that most nouns belonging to class (ii) are animate and he considers this
referential property as underlying the split in definiteness marking within
the language. This contribution highlights how definiteness encoding can
interact with language-internal factors, such as the lexical classes of the
nouns they are marking, adding a new dimension to the weak vs. strong definite
marking generalization. 

In Chapter 3, ‘Stong vs. weak definites: Evidence from Lithuanian adjectives’,
Milena Sereikaite presents an interesting manifestation of the weak vs. strong
distinction from Lithuanian. In this language, which does not have a class of
articles in their own right, the distinction appears on certain adjectives.
Adjectives have a long form, which aligns semantically with a strong definite
description marking anaphoricity, and a short form signalling the uniqueness
of the referent, aligning neatly with the observations in Schwarz 2009. The
author analyzes the distribution and interpretation of strong and weak
adjectival forms in various contexts in order to demonstrate that long, strong
adjectives are felicitous only in contexts where the noun refers anaphorically
to a previously introduced entity. By contrast, the short form is both found
in indefinite contexts and in contexts requiring a uniqueness – i.e., a weak
definite, reading. This paper provides an important contribution regarding the
cross-linguistic variation in the expression of definiteness in different
languages, especially languages that do not have straightforward article
inventories.    

In Chapter 4, entitled ‘On (in)definite expressions in American Sign Language
(ASL)’, Ava Irani demonstrates that, contrary to previous accounts (cf.
Koulidobrova & Lillo-Martin 2016), the interpretation of the pointing sign
‘IX’ aligns more with a strong definite article than a demonstrative in many
cases, seeing as they are felicitous in anaphoric (and other relevant)
contexts, and not those typically associated with demonstratives. She confirms
that both NP and ‘IX’+NP configurations can form definite or indefinite
descriptions such that ASL does not encode definiteness with this marker per
se. Rather this sign must interact with the established referential loci to
which the speaker makes reference in association with a noun in order to
permit a definite interpretation. For these reasons, Irani suggests that
definiteness in ASL may not be adequately captured along the classical
dimensions of familiarity and uniqueness. 

In Chapter 5, ‘A nascent definiteness marker in Yokot’an Maya’, Maurice Pico
discusses the reduced form (‘ni’) of the distal demonstrative (‘jini’). The
author discusses that, although previous descriptions have labelled this
particle as a definite article, the semantic notions of uniqueness and
familiarity do not align with actual usage patterns. In reporting the findings
of an extensive textual analysis, he concludes that ‘ni’ in fact signals a
topic shift, not definiteness proper. According to the author, these findings
place the particle at an early phase of the generally accepted
grammaticalization trajectory for definite articles out of demonstratives (the
author cites Hawkins 2004).     

In Chapter 6, ‘Definiteness across languages and in L2 acquisition’, Bert Le
Bruyn contributes to the research program laid out in Ionin et al. (2004),
which compared the (over)usage of definite articles by L2 speakers of English
with a sample comprising speakers of Korean, Russian and Japanese. In this
earlier work, the authors analyzed the overproduction of definite articles by
these groups of L2 speakers as due to their usage of the article for specific
referents, even where these referents were indefinite (i.e., the referent is
known to the speaker, but not to the hearer). Le Bruyn performs two tests
regarding the usage of English definite articles on Mandarin L1 speakers. The
first test demonstrated that these speakers did not comply with the findings
from the earlier study (Ionin et al. 2004) – i.e., they did not overgenerate
definiteness marking on the basis of speaker-oriented specificity. The second
test examined their usage of the definite article on the basis of
foregrounding and noteworthiness, and he found that Mandarin L1 speakers did
in fact overproduce definite forms when referring to non-specific,
backgrounded referents. This paper is a call to expand the domain of inquiry
for L1 effects upon L2 acquisition with particular attention to definite
marking from speakers of article-less languages.

The second section of this volume aims to shed light on the syntactic loci of
definiteness markers in various languages and how these interact with other
material projected into the extended nominal domain. The first paper in this
section, Chapter 7, ‘Licensing D in classifier languages and ‘numeral
blocking’’ by David Hall presents an analysis focusing mostly on two
classifier languages, Wenzhou Wu and Weining Ahmao, which questions earlier
treatments of definiteness in such languages (e.g., Cheng & Sybesma 1999). Put
simply, he provides an alternative analysis to a classic puzzle; in many
classifier languages, classifier-noun combinations can be interpreted as
definite, but this interpretation is not available for number-classifier-noun
configurations. In contrast to an analysis where the number projection
intervenes between the classifier’s generation site (ClP) and the DP, blocking
its movement to D so that it cannot receive a definite interpretation (cf.
Simpson 2005 for Mandarin), the author suggests that the classifier-noun and
number-classifier-noun configurations are structurally distinct. Crucially, he
suggests that the number-classifier component of the latter configuration
forms a constituent in its own right so that the classifier can no longer move
independently to the D layer in order to receive a definite interpretation.
The author provides data from several disparate classifier languages to
demonstrate how this analysis might be extended to other systems and how it
might help us to better understand the interplay between definiteness and
other functional material in noun-internal syntax. 

In Chapter 8, ‘On kinds and anaphoricity in languages without definite
articles’, Miloje Despic contrasts the interpretational possibilities for bare
nouns in several languages that do not have definite articles, including
Serbian, Turkish, Japanese, Mandarin and Hindi. She demonstrates that many of
these languages permit anaphoric interpretations with bare nominals, often in
conjunction with the presence of number marking, confirming earlier accounts
(Dayal 2004). On a typological level, this paper strengthens this earlier
claim by empirically demonstrating that anaphoric readings are strictly
available in languages where bare nominals referring to kinds can receive
number marking. On theoretical grounds, the author adheres to the conception
that bare nominals ought not to receive anaphoric interpretations because they
are NPs lacking the crucial DP-layer required for a definite meaning. She
contributes to a body of literature (e.g., Chierchia 1998, Dayal 2004) that
posits a solution outside of the syntax proper by invoking semantic
type-shifting operations. This work highlights how certain facets of
definiteness may be better treated (inside and) outside of the narrow syntax. 
 

In Chapter 9, ‘Definiteness in Russian bare nominal kinds’, Olga Borik and
Maria Teresa Espinal treat a similar puzzle to that in the preceding paper,
namely the interpretation of bare nominal referring to kinds. They suggest
that bare singular nouns are interpreted as definite kinds when they are found
in the appropriate type of predicate, namely kind-level predicates (e.g., ‘the
panda is on the verge of extinction’ – from p. 294). In contrast to the
assumptions from Chapter 8, Borik and Espinal posit that Russian does have the
crucial DP-layer, responsible for definite interpretations, even without
articles, providing elaborate syntactic and semantic data to justify this
position. Together these two chapters provide valuable insight into the
relationship between definiteness and kind-reference across diverse languages,
and each represents a different side of the DP vs. NP debate (i.e., the split
DP hypothesis).  

The final section of this volume is concerned with atypical uses of definite
nouns beyond signalling a uniqueness and familiarity interpretation. The first
two papers in this section treat so-called weak referentials – also
confusingly labelled weak definites – as in the English example ‘we’ve both
seen the doctor twice this week’ where the doctor does not refer to a unique
or familiar individual, and can refer to a different doctor at each instance
for each individual. In Chapter 10, ‘A morpho-semantic account of weak
definites and Bare Institutional Singulars (BIS) in English’, Adina Williams
analyzes cases such as ‘going to the store’, an instance of a weak definite,
and ‘going to school’, where ‘school’ is a BIS. For the author, weak definites
and BIS’s are two classes of weak nominals that have crucial structural
features in common accounting for their shared semantic and syntactic
behaviour. Crucially, however, no noun belongs to both classes and membership
is determined idiosyncratically on a root-by-root basis. She discussed how
both have reduced syntactic structures, lacking the number projection (NumP)
associated with full nominals – which is unsurprising given that they cannot
receive plural marking and retain weak reference (e.g., #‘going to the
stores’, #’going to schools’), and neither can accept modifiers such as
‘good’, ‘red’, ‘expensive’ (i.e., high adjectives – see pp. 334-335). She
discusses many other traits that these weak nominal constructions have in
common. The author’s analysis captures both the number-neutral semantics
shared by both weak definites and BIS nominals in English and their inherent
lexical idiosyncrasies.  

In Chapter 11, ‘Is the weak definite a generic? An experimental
investigation’, Thaís Maíra Machado de Sá et al. present data from an
extensive corpus analysis project and four separate experiments that shed
light on an important question: whether weak definite nominals are in fact a
subtype of generic definite nominals (e.g., ‘In the XVIII century, hygiene
rules were introduced into the hospital in the Western world’ – p. 348). This
is not a straightforward question given that neither refer to a certain unique
(and familiar) individual, among other shared traits (c.f. Aguilar-Guevara &
Zwarts 2011). Firstly, as regards the corpus analysis, the authors present
quantitative evidence from Brazilian Portuguese (BP) that generic and weak
definite nominals distribute rather differently. Not only were weak definites
more common and occurred much more frequently in object position, there were
no instances where weak and generic definites were found in complementary
distribution on the basis of syntactic role or lexical aspect. To complement
these findings, the authors conducted four experiments on American English
speakers combining online survey-taking and laboratory-based methodologies.
The first experiment presented a judgement task to determine whether generic,
weak and regular objects were referring to an individual or a category. In the
second experiment, participants performed a sentence completion task that
crucially contained an anaphoric continuation. The third experiment was
essentially a free completion task established along the lines of the second
experiment, reporting highly similar findings. The final task was similar to
the preceding two except that the participant was asked to repeat the noun in
their completions. Ultimately, the results from each of these experiments
pointed to regular and weak definites patterning distinctly from generic
definites. In the case of the first experiment, generics were almost always
considered as referring to categories, whereas weak definites behaved more
like regular definites referring to individuals. In the second experiment,
generics did not allow interpretations with anaphors, whereas weak definites
aligned with regular definites allowing the use of anaphors in continuations.
These findings were essentially replicated across the third and fourth
experiments. Taken together, the authors provide a great deal of evidence from
corpus-based and experimental research to demonstrate that weak definites are
not treated as a subtype of generic definite nominals in either BP or English.
Ultimately, this paper stresses the fact that separate analyses are needed to
properly capture the differences between weak definite nouns and generic
definites, both of which are crucially distinct from the analyses purported
for regular definite nouns. This contribution demonstrates the need to achieve
a language-internal typology of definiteness constructions in addition to a
cross-linguistic typology.

In Chapter 12, ‘Most vs. the most in languages where the more means most’,
Elizabeth Coppock and Linnea Strand discuss one of the more frequent uses of
definiteness markers beyond marking uniqueness and/or familiarity, namely in
superlative constructions. The authors focus their study on several Romance
languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian) and Greek, and they begin with
a thorough comparative survey based upon various aspects of their distribution
and their meaning – strictly adjectival/adverbial uses, quality and/or
quantity readings, optionality of definiteness marking, etc. For the authors,
the descriptive facts are captured as the dynamic relationship between the
pressure to mark uniqueness – superlatives are inherently unique, and the fact
that these languages tend to avoid combining the definite article with event-
and degree-predicates. The authors combine these observations into a formal
compositional analysis that can be used as a model to capture the
implementation of definiteness markers in superlative constructions in other
languages.

In Chapter 13, the final contribution in this work, ‘Definiteness,
partitivity, and domain restriction: A fresh look at definite reduplication’,
Urtzi Etxeberria and Anastasia Giannakidou draw a connection between multiple
definite marking (i.e., definite reduplication) and partitive interpretations
via domain restriction. Although this contribution focuses primarily on Greek
data, the authors draw connections between these facts and observations and
analyses regarding Basque, Salish and certain Slavic languages. The authors
suggest that constructions with multiple definite markers are marking both the
head noun as a unique definite, and another element (noun, adjective, etc.) as
a restricted domain for that noun to be interpreted within. For instance, they
provide a Greek example glossed as ‘the-red the-bikes are French’ in a context
(in front of us there are red, blue, and yellow bikes – see pp. 442-443). In
this case, the speaker refers to both a unique group of bikes which belong to
the ‘red’-subgroup of bikes in this context. This example roughly sketches the
analysis that the authors put forward for multiple definite constructions
using a formal semantic approach. This contribution provides a treatment of
the partitive(-like) usage of definites and outlines how this treatment might
be amenable to some languages with such constructions, but not to others. 

EVALUATION

This volume presents a collection of high-quality articles that touch on
various aspects of definiteness marking and/or interpretation without
significant overlap in theoretical or methodological orientation, or the
languages they study. On the one hand, the diversity of materials and analyses
found in this work reflects the underlying variation found in definiteness
marking across natural languages, and across the field of linguistics
generally. For instance, just as Despic (Chapter 8) adopts the position that
bare nouns are always NPs, and not DPs, Borik and Espinal (Chapter 9) provide
ample evidence for certain bare nouns (at least in Russian) to behave like
full DPs with a silent article. The fact that two competing positions are
advocated in the same volume can be enlightening to scholars aiming at a
holistic understanding of the approaches in the literature. In addition, taken
together, the papers in this volume demonstrate the need to go beyond our
preconceptions, particularly those associated with our methodological
orientations, in order to address syntactic, semantic and functional
subtleties regarding definiteness and to get the facts straight. On the other
hand, it may be the case that this volume is too diverse regarding the target
languages and the analytical approaches that it brings together. Although this
criticism might be put forward for many proceedings-style volumes of this type
and is not particular to this volume, I feel that this book amalgamates so
many disparate analytical techniques and perspectives that it lacks coherence.
For this reason, it is difficult to take away any meaningful generalizations
per se that could be used to typologize definiteness across languages, as the
title of the volume suggests. 

For the reasons stated above, this work is best viewed as a collection of
high-quality papers that ought to be considered in their own right. Each paper
provides a thorough analysis that can be followed up by future work within its
given domain and for the language(s) that it targets. Ultimately, this volume
illustrates how little we actually know regarding the variation found across
the definite systems of the world, and that fact in and of itself ought to
inspire future work. A scholar interested in any facet of definiteness can
find at least one meaningful paper in this volume and ought to take the time
to read it. 

REFERENCES

Aguilar-Guevara, Ana & Joost Zwarts. 2011. Weak definites and reference to
kinds. Proceedings of SALT 20. 179-196.

Cheng, Lisa Lai-Shen & Rint Sybesma. 1999. Bare and not-so-bare nouns and the
structure of NP. Linguistic Inquiry 30(4). 509-542.

Chierchia, Gennaro. 1998. Reference to kinds across languages. Natural
Language Semantics 6. 339-405.

Dayal, Veneeta. 2004. Number marking and (in)definiteness in kind terms.
Linguistics and Philosophy 27. 393-450.

Hawkins, John. 2004. Efficiency and complexity in grammars. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Ionin, Tania, Heejeong Ko & Kenneth Wexler. 2004. Article semantics in L2
acquisition: The role of specificity. Language Acquisition 12(1). 3-69.

Koulidobrova, Elena & Diane Lillo-Martin. 2016. A ‘point’ of inquiry: The case
of the (non-) pronominal IX in ASL. In Patrick Grosz & Pritty Patel-Grosz
(eds.), The impact of pronominal form on interpretation (Studies in Generative
Grammar). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 221-250.

Schwarz, Florian. 2009. Two types of definites in natural language. PhD
thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

Simpson, Andrew. 2005. Classifiers and DP structure in Southeast Asian
languages. In Richard Kayne & Guglielmo Cinque (eds.), The Oxford handbook of
comparative syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 806-838.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Justin Case is a doctoral candidate in linguistics at the University of Ottawa
(Canada). His primary research interests include theoretical morphosyntax,
description of understudied languages (Ecuadorian Siona - Tucanoan) and
typology with a focus on nominal structures and differential object marking.





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