This chapter unpacks the complex stitching that makes up the reference tapestry by reviewing theories of indefiniteness and definiteness and by examining the complex issues of in-/definiteness. The chapter argues that definiteness is a speaker-centred concept, including whether the speaker expects the addressee able to share a sufficiently similar conceptualisation of the referent and that the entire discourse event contributes to the establishment of an entity as definite or not. For this reason, we argue for the separation of reference (function) from the expression (form). An indefinite expression (form) can be used for definite reference (function) and a definite expression (form) can be used for indefinite reference (function). There is no one-to-one relationship between the lexicogrammatical realisation of the expression and its function in an act of reference. The chapter includes discussion of various types of referential choice including lexical expressions, pronouns, and proper names.

Two types of existential sentences in Chinese are introduced in this chapter. The use of place words, instead of dummy pronouns such as it or there, is emphasized, and the compositions of these place words are discussed. Explanations are also given regarding the differences between existential sentences in Chinese and in their English equivalents.

This chapter shows that there were fundamental changes in two types of information structure: one is at the clause level, involving the arrangement of new and given information, and the other is at the predicate level, involving the arrangement of resultative and non-resultative (accompanying) information. The first is cross-linguistically true and can be found in many other languages; the second may be particular to the language and has thus far been known to exist only in Chinese. Throughout the entire history of Chinese grammar, these two principles of information organization are critical for understanding how the grammar has evolved over time. On the one hand, both reflect the results of grammatical developments; on the other hand, they motivated a series of significant changes in history that together have largely shaped the grammatical system of Contemporary Chinese.

This chapter demonstrates that because of the fusion of the verb and the resultative via reanalysis, the syntactic position for a patient noun between them was eliminated so that the originally intervening patient noun needed to be rearranged somewhere in the sentence on the basis of the following principle: the patient noun was introduced in preverbal position by the disposal marker if it was definite, and was introduced by the first verb of the verb-copying construction if it was indefinite. This issue is related to the motivations for the emergence of the verb-copying construction and the unmarked SOV structure, all of which were entirely innovative in Modern Chinese.

This chapter demonstrates that the demonstratives zhè and gè in Mandarin Chinese and its dialects were grammaticalized from two general classifiers in late Middle Chinese, both of which originated from ordinary nouns. Based on diachronic facts and dialectal data, the present analysis addresses the motivation and mechanism for the course of development from classifiers to demonstratives. This finding may make a significant contribution to historical linguistics.

The ditransitive construction is an essential grammatical device that has always existed throughout the history of Chinese. However, its semantic and syntactic properties have varied quite dramatically over time due to the influence of the general grammatical system in different periods. Generally, the ditransitive construction of the Chinese language has undergone a typological change, which makes the Chinese ditransitive construction inconsistent with SVO languages.

Chapter 3 provides an overview of the English articles the and a(n) in SLA and intervention research. The chapter discusses semantic concepts commonly addressed in SLA studies of articles, including definiteness, specificity, genericity, and kind reference. After a review of relevant SLA experimental studies on the topic, Chapter 3 provides an overview of intervention studies with English articles. The intervention studies are divided into two types: those that focus on particular instructional techniques, such as explicit instruction and different feedback types, and those that take as their starting point theoretical approaches to article semantics. English is the target language in all of the studies discussed, and many of the studies focus on challenges posed by English articles for learners from article-less native languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

The study presented in this book focuses on the acquisition, maintenance and change of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish, English and Romanian in contact with English in the United States. Differential Object Marking (DOM) is the overt marking of some direct objects and is a widespread among languages of the world. DOM is an iconic procedure because the arguments that are overtly marked morphologically are more salient/prominent semantically or pragmatically than unmarked objects. This chapter describes how DOM is manifested in Spanish, Romanian and Hindi and presents current syntactic synchronic analyses of the phenomenon in these languages. The diachronic evolution of DOM in language contact situations is also discussed.

Definite descriptions are an area where linguistics and philosophy have been intimately intertwined as long as they have been acquainted. But are we past all that now, in the modern era, as work on definite descriptions becomes less focussed on English, and more cross-linguistic? This chapter highlights one great unresolved issue in the theory of definite descriptions that persists even in this modern era of crosslinguistic comparison, a foundational (hence philosophical) one, pitting dynamic semantics against situation semantics. A prominent synthesis of these competing (though compatible) frameworks says that both are needed, for “strong” and “weak” articles, respectively. The strong vs. weak distinction has served as inspiration for much recent work on the crosslinguistic semantics of definiteness. While this new development has led to a much richer and more well-rounded picture of definiteness as a phenomenon, the predictions of the two analyses overlap too much, leading to spurious debate when fieldworkers go to analyze a new language. The chapter aims to clarify what is at stake empirically in the choice among analyses, and advocates for continued philosophical reflection as we operationalize our methods of discovery.

Nouns head nominals, which head noun phrases (NPs). The most common NP functions are subject, object, and predicative complement. Nouns mostly inflect for number: singular or plural. Pronouns are a special subset of nouns which also inflect for case. A nominal includes a head noun and any internal dependents. Unlike most phrases, nominals can have adjective-phrase modifiers, and NPs uniquely may have a constituent in determiner function.

Though it’s true that only nouns denote ‘people, places, and things’, they denote almost anything, including actions. Along with number, the semantic notion of definiteness and the count/non-count distinction affect the choice of determiner. Subject-verb agreement is also affected, for example, with measure expressions. Determiners are usually determinative phrases or genitive NPs. Nominals allow complements, usually preposition phrases. NPs also have a range of external dependents, including predeterminer modifiers. Determiners and modifiers may function as fused heads, in which case, the NP may not actually include a noun. The pronouns, including personal, relative, and interrogative types, have deictic and anaphoric uses and notably have gender.

This chapter provides an overview of the research on semantics and related interface phenomena in heritage language grammars, focusing on three main questions: (i) whether the phenomena under investigation are subject to incomplete acquisition and/or attrition in heritage language grammars; (ii) whether heritage language grammars are subject to cross-linguistic influence from the dominant language; and (iii) whether interface phenomena are particularly vulnerable in incomplete acquisition and/or attrition. These questions are investigated in four linguistic domains that fall at the interface between syntax and semantics where there has been a substantial body of research with heritage speakers: semantics of the verbal domain, such as tense/aspect and unaccusativity; semantics of the nominal domain, such as definiteness and genericity; semantics of subject and object expression, including binding and case-marking; and quantifier semantics.

This paper investigates article use in learner corpora in order to (i) examine how both the native language and proficiency level influence the patterns of article use, misuse, and omission and (ii) examine whether patterns of the overuse of the with specific indefinites found in experimental studies are also present in learner corpora. To this end, 200 texts from the Cambridge Learner Corpus are examined: 100 texts from Spanish-speaking learners of English and 100 texts from Russian and Ukrainian-speaking learners of English. Each subcorpus has an even distribution between learners at CEFR B1 and B2 proficiency levels. The results confirm that the learners’ native language affects article use: speakers of Spanish, an article language, show an increase in correct article use with proficiency; in contrast, speakers of Russian, an article-less language, continue to make article errors. On the other hand, the particular patterns of article misuse found in prior experimental work are not found in learner corpora: while Russian-speaking learners do overuse the with indefinites in the corpora, this error type is not tied to specificity. This null finding could be due in part to the relatively low number of errors of the overuse in the learner corpus.

Chapter 5 deals with (asymmetric) differential object marking (DOM), a phenomenon occurring in over 300 languages whereby the object of a verb can be either marked or unmarked for morphological case, depending on a number of factors. These factors have to do with the individuation/prominence of the object, often its definiteness, specificity and animacy value. The chapter begins with illustrations of the phenomenon in several languages, showing its sensitivity to different properties of the object. The reasoning behind DOM is then discussed. Two specific proposals are considered: one treats DOM as a signal of higher transitivity; the other views it as a disambiguation mechanism whereby a non-prototypical object is marked and, as a result, not confused with the subject. In addition to features of the object, properties of the verb have been argued to play a role in DOM; this relation is considered in a separate section. Further, several cross-linguistic analyses of the phenomenon are reviewed.

The article examines the history of noun inflection from Proto-Germanic to the modern Germanic languages which simplified the former system to different degrees. Icelandic preserved the most complex structures whereas English lost declension classes as well as gender and case. Interestingly, languages with three genders use them for the organization of their noun inflection, whereas those with two genders tend to dissociate them from declension. Most languages formalized their plural expression, i.e., morphological, phonological, or prosodic features of the stem determine the plural allomorph. The article shows that German developed a rather complex noun class system, which is based on semantics, gender, and form. Zero inflection can only be found in languages with distinct singular and plural articles. If these articles are homophonous, overt plural inflection is obligatory. These interrelations show that the noun is integrated into the NP and that its components contribute to the expression of the nominal categories.