Norwegian, like Swedish and Faroese, exhibits double definiteness: modified definite phrases normally contain both a prenominal determiner and a suffixed definite article on the noun. However, exceptions—phrases with only the determiner or only the suffixed article—can be found. This article investigates adjectives which do not need to be preceded by the prenominal determiner in Norwegian. Corpus data and acceptability judgments are used to describe these exceptions and to propose a syntactic analysis. The study shows that there are three types of adjectives in Norwegian: regular ones that require double definiteness, exceptional adjectives that allow determiner omission, and quantifier adjectives that never occur with a determiner. I argue that phrases with exceptional adjectives can be accounted for by the same movement that is proposed for determiner-less phrases in Icelandic and Northern Swedish (Julien 2002, 2005). Finally, the article presents a brief exploration of the patterns of variation in omission versus presence of the determiner, including historical and dialectal variation.

This article investigates the evolution of bare nouns, used without a determiner, through the history of the French language. The loss of bare nouns is charted through calibrated corpora of non-fictional prose texts from the same genres and region, ranging from the 12th to the 19th century. The change is first completed with nouns in subject function, significantly advances with direct objects, and progresses with obliques. The extensive quantitative documentation demonstrates that the change is impacted by the syntactic function of the noun, along the Accessibility Hierarchy. The speculation is examined that the more accessible functions encourage expression of (definite) determiners, thus explaining the pattern of change.

A major challenge presented by noun class systems of Senufo languages is the non-trivial interaction between the agreement features of the noun phrase and the noun class specification on the head noun. In Kafire (Senufo, Côte d’Ivoire), demonstratives normally agree with the head noun independent of whether or not the head noun is modified by adjectives. Some adjectives, however, are exceptions to the general rule: in their presence the demonstrative appears in Class 2 or 3 (depending on the adjective), and fails to agree with the head noun. We present an account of the exceptional behavior of such adjectives within the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar. We show that agreement in Kafire is a heterogeneous phenomenon that is best viewed as transitional between a system of semantically motivated agreement and a system of noun classes that is no longer dependent on meaning. Vestiges of the old system have been preserved in a variety of phenomena that have to be addressed individually using different kinds of formal tools provided by the framework. The variety of formal devices required to describe the functioning of the agreement system reflects the complex diachrony and the cross-modal (lexico-syntactic) synchronic nature of agreement phenomena.

There has been a substantial amount of research on heritage language acquisition and diachronic change. Although recent work has increasingly pointed to parallels between those two areas, it remains unclear how systematic these are. In this paper, we provide a bird's eye view, illustrating how patterns of diachronic change are mirrored in heritage language grammars. In doing so, we focus on one of the best-described grammaticalization processes – namely, the formation of articles from demonstratives and numerals, reviewing studies on heritage varieties which mirror those processes. Based on this review, we make two main points: that change in heritage language can be predicted based on established diachronic scenarios, and that heritage languages often amplify incipient changes in the baseline. After discussing a number of attested changes in a bilingual context, we identify directions for future research in the domain of determiners in heritage languages.

This paper considers the syntactic and semantic properties of two vocabulary items in Tagalog, ang and ng. It is shown that although ang and ng appear to encode definiteness (via familiarity), they are in fact unmarked for definiteness, being compatible with both familiar and novel readings. Crucial data from modification by weak quantifiers are presented in favour of this description. The default interpretation of ang and ng as familiar and novel, respectively, arises due to their syntactic position (subject versus object). Given that ang and ng mark case, it is argued that they are case markers in K° and not determiners.

This article focuses on whether determiner omission by two-year-old children isconstrained at the level of the prosodic foot or whether it is a function of thedifferent levels of the prosodic hierarchy. Nine French-speaking children aged2;0 to 2;7 were asked to repeat 54 four- or five-word sentences of the form“Pronoun V NP” with three conditions: a) det + monosyllabicnoun; b) det + bisyllabic noun; c) det + monosyllabic adjective+ monosyllabic noun. The results show 1) more determiner omission incondition b than in a; 2) more determiner omission in c than in b. It is shownthat determiner omission is not accounted for by a low-level stress-alternationconstraint and that the level of prosodic structure to which the determiner isattached plays a role in determiner omission.