TY - JOUR
T1 - Uniqueness in languages with and without articles: Catalan vs. Russian
AU - Seres, Daria
AU - Borràs-Comes, Joan
AU - Espinal, M.Teresa
N1 - Acknowledgements:
We would like to thank Olga Borik for her comments and suggestions, related to the theoretical and the empirical part of the study. We are also grateful to the audience of ROLLING (Research on Language and Linguistics of the University of Rovira i Virgili) seminar held in May 2021, where an early version of this paper was presented. This study is supported by the Spanish MINECO (grant POID2020–112801GB–100), by the Generalitat de Catalunya (grant 2017SGR634) and an ICREA Academia fellowship awarded to the third author.
PY - 2021/6/30
Y1 - 2021/6/30
N2 - The article compares the interpretation of singular topical nominals in Romance (Catalan) and Slavic (Russian), and its relation to the presence/absence of the article in the overt morphosyntax. The empirical study, presented in this paper, confirmed the theoretical prediction that in Catalan the presence of a definite article conveys uniqueness of the referent, while an indefinite article suggests nonuniqueness. In the absence of articles (in Russian), bare nominals are compatible with both a uniqueness and a non-uniqueness interpretation. The reading of a bare noun phrase is inferred pragmatically, depending on contextual factors and the background knowledge of the interlocutors.
AB - The article compares the interpretation of singular topical nominals in Romance (Catalan) and Slavic (Russian), and its relation to the presence/absence of the article in the overt morphosyntax. The empirical study, presented in this paper, confirmed the theoretical prediction that in Catalan the presence of a definite article conveys uniqueness of the referent, while an indefinite article suggests nonuniqueness. In the absence of articles (in Russian), bare nominals are compatible with both a uniqueness and a non-uniqueness interpretation. The reading of a bare noun phrase is inferred pragmatically, depending on contextual factors and the background knowledge of the interlocutors.
UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/e925871a-a861-3c5b-b716-4b9acdb5a4ce/
U2 - 10.26881/bp.2021.3.06
DO - 10.26881/bp.2021.3.06
M3 - Article
SN - 1732-1220
VL - 18
SP - 163
EP - 195
JO - Beyond Philology
JF - Beyond Philology
IS - 3
ER -