The grammar of indefinites

Abstract

This chapter discusses the two indefinites that have been treated as specific indefinites in scholarship on Classical Latin: quidam ‘a certain’ and aliquis ‘some (or other)’. While with quidam the referent is introduced as known to the speaker, aliquis expresses ignorance on the part of the speaker with respect to the exact identity of the discourse referent. As concerns quidam, the pragmatic conditions it obeys in Classical and Late Latin are examined, and possible causes for the fact that it is not continued in Romance are discussed. In the case of aliquis, it is argued that a better description of its semantic properties can be reached by treating it as an epistemic indefinite. In Late Latin some of the distributional constraints to which it was subject in the Classical language disappear: aliquis extends into polarity contexts, preluding the behavior of its Romance continuations.