{"title":"Marking definiteness in an articleless language","authors":"Arum Kang","doi":"10.1075/lali.00084.kan","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\nThe main purpose of this paper is to identify the novel type of Korean definiteness marker. Especially I show that Korean KU which originated from the morphological demonstrative ‘that’, instantiates a solid pattern of distribution of definiteness marker. Mainly focusing on the semantico-pragmatic role of KU, the proposal comprises three main parts: (i) Given that Korean employs distinct devices teased apart into uniqueness (i.e. referential use) and familiarity (i.e. anaphoric use) in its definiteness system, I show that the effect of referential use in argument saturating function is achieved by the covert “determiner” in bare nouns, whereas anaphoric use in argument non-saturating function is achieved by the overt KU; (ii) The semantic contribution of KU is analyzed as a domain restrictor (DDR; Etxeberria & Giannakidou 2010) which supplies an indexical property as an argument (Schwarz 2009, 2013; Jenks 2018); (iii) I further show that the DDR operator is present in the syntax, falling out from the standard D position as an adjunctive modifier in a lower DP layer. The contribution of my work is that the proposed account allows us to widen our view of cross-linguistic variation to cases where the prerequisite of definiteness is based on the dissociation of meaning (i.e. the semantic role of D as encoding familiarity) and form (i.e. the syntactic role of D as an argument-building function).","PeriodicalId":45159,"journal":{"name":"Language and Linguistics","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2021-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Language and Linguistics","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.00084.kan","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
The main purpose of this paper is to identify the novel type of Korean definiteness marker. Especially I show that Korean KU which originated from the morphological demonstrative ‘that’, instantiates a solid pattern of distribution of definiteness marker. Mainly focusing on the semantico-pragmatic role of KU, the proposal comprises three main parts: (i) Given that Korean employs distinct devices teased apart into uniqueness (i.e. referential use) and familiarity (i.e. anaphoric use) in its definiteness system, I show that the effect of referential use in argument saturating function is achieved by the covert “determiner” in bare nouns, whereas anaphoric use in argument non-saturating function is achieved by the overt KU; (ii) The semantic contribution of KU is analyzed as a domain restrictor (DDR; Etxeberria & Giannakidou 2010) which supplies an indexical property as an argument (Schwarz 2009, 2013; Jenks 2018); (iii) I further show that the DDR operator is present in the syntax, falling out from the standard D position as an adjunctive modifier in a lower DP layer. The contribution of my work is that the proposed account allows us to widen our view of cross-linguistic variation to cases where the prerequisite of definiteness is based on the dissociation of meaning (i.e. the semantic role of D as encoding familiarity) and form (i.e. the syntactic role of D as an argument-building function).
期刊介绍:
LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS (ISSN:1606-822X; Online ISSN: 2309-5067) is an academic publication of the Institute of Linguistics at Academia Sinica. Established in 2000, it publishes research in general and theoretical linguistics on the languages of East Asia and the Pacific region, including Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian, and the Austroasiatic and Altaic language families (Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages are not included). LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS publishes both a journal and a monograph series. LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS is a pure linguistics journal. We only publish articles on (descriptive and theoretical) linguistic studies but not articles on applied linguistics such as language teaching or language learning.