When: Monday, May 20, 2024, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PMWhere: Arts Two 2.17 and online, Mile End campus
Workshop 1: Demonstrative to Definite, What Changes and What Stays the Same
Click below to download the workshop slides:
RQF 2024 Workshop 1 Slides [PDF 506KB]
Many languages, including the most familiar Indo-European languages, have article systems. The division of labor between the definite and the indefinite article has posed a real challenge for formal accounts. Given the complexity of article systems, the fact that as many languages lack either one or both articles poses interesting questions for universal grammar. Do article-less languages have the same expressive power as articled languages? And if they do, why do languages develop articles at all?
It has been shown that definite articles typically develop from demonstratives and indefinite articles from the numeral ‘one’.
Most languages, if not all, have demonstratives but a significant number of languages lack definite articles. In order to understand how the functions of a definite article are covered in a language that lacks them, we must understand the character of the two items in the languages that have them. We choose English as a canonical example of such a language. We posit that a demonstrative has two parts to its meaning, an indexical part and a contrastive part. The first demarcates a possibly proper sub-domain in the context of evaluation within which a unique referent must be established. At the same time, it must also be possible for the referent to be potentially contrasted with another entity in the context of evaluation or outside. A definite lacks certainly lacks the contrastive part and may well lack also the indexical part. It simply requires its referent to be unique in the context of evaluation.
We show how this accounts for a range of facts that have been discussed in the literature, including some that have not previously been explained. Here is an example. The definite article is compatible with proper names in many articled languages, but demonstratives are not. We show that a proper name, suitably adjusted for type, satisfies the requirements of the definite and languages make a parametric choice between projecting an article or not. There is no cross-linguistic variation with respect to demonstratives and proper names – they are uniformly unacceptable. And, strikingly, their unacceptability can almost always be ameliorated under exclamatives – a fact that can be explained on the basis of the requirement for potential contrast. Here data from ASL provides an interesting nuance.
The novel part of the claim in this workshop is the need to include the contrast potential in the semantic profile of demonstratives. Based on this we can show that the gap between a demonstrative and a definite is bigger than the gap between a numeral and an indefinite article. While the difference between the demonstrative and the definite will continue to be relevant in the second workshop, the difference between the numeral and the indefinite will play a role only in the discussion of New Englishes in the third workshop.
A final point that we will touch upon, possibly in the second workshop, are languages in which demonstratives require the support of a full DP to piggy-back on: Akan and Bangla, for example.