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" To ‘The’ or Not to ‘The’: Cross-Linguistic Correlations Between Existing Morphosyntax and the Emergence of Definite Articles "
Evers, Stephanie
Bohnemeyer, Juergen
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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1057930
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TL57047
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| Main Entry
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Evers, Stephanie
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To ‘The’ or Not to ‘The’: Cross-Linguistic Correlations Between Existing Morphosyntax and the Emergence of Definite Articles\ Evers, StephanieBohnemeyer, Juergen
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| College
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State University of New York at Buffalo
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| Date
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2020
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Ph.D.
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2020
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275 p.
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| Abstract
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The ability to differentiate old (definite) and new (indefinite) information is necessary for successful human communication (Evans and Levinson, 2009:437). Definite articles are one method of indicating that information is old, but these are present in fewer than half of the world’s languages (Dryer, 2013a). If indicating definiteness in discourse is essential for communicative success, it stands to reason that languages without definite articles communicate this information through alternate means. This dissertation investigates why definite articles might fail to emerge in a language and asks whether or not the use of specific morphosyntactic properties can be used to predict the absence of a definite article. It also asks whether or not alternate cues can be used to predict that a referent will be definite in languages that lack a definite article. To determine whether or not a relationship exists between the use of specific morphosyntactic properties and the emergence of definite articles, I conducted a grammar-mining study of 100 typologically diverse languages. These languages were coded for the presence or absence of ten morphosyntactic properties, including the use of definite articles. Random forest and conditional inference models were used to test whether or not the absence of a definite article could be predicted based on other elements in a language. To determine whether or not alternate cues can be used to predict definiteness, I also conducted corpus studies of Colloquial Jakarta Indonesian and Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic), two languages without articles. Logistic regression, random forest, and conditional inference models were used to determine if language-specific properties could be used to predict whether or not a discourse referent would be definite. The results of this research show that languages with case marking, OV word order, flexible subject order, and ergative or split ergative alignment are less likely than other languages to develop a definite article. They also show that in Colloquial Jakarta Indonesian and Kalaallisut, elements such as word order and case could be used to predict whether or not a referent will be definite, even without the added benefit of context. These results suggest that semantic definiteness can be cued by properties other than definite articles, and that cognitive pressures toward efficiency depress the likelihood of a definite article emerging in the presence of such cues.
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Language
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Linguistics
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Sociolinguistics
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Bohnemeyer, Juergen
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State University of New York at Buffalo
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