Introduction 675
5.1. Articles 677
5.1.1. Noun phrases headed by an article 679
5.1.1.1. The core meaning of the articles 679
5.1.1.2. Definiteness and indefiniteness 684
5.1.1.3. Specificity and non-specificity 688
5.1.1.4. Distributivity 690
5.1.1.5. Genericity 692
5.1.1.5.1. Count nouns 692
5.1.1.5.2. Non-count nouns 702
5.1.1.6. Summary 708
5.1.2. Noun phrases without an article 709
5.1.2.1. Proper nouns 709
5.1.2.2. Vocatives 717
5.1.2.3. Special cases 720
5.1.3. Definite articles with acronyms and abbreviations 723
5.1.4. Deviant semantics 725
5.1.4.1. Complex verbal predicates 725
5.1.4.2. Articles in evaluative contexts 732
5.1.4.3. The definite article in measure phrases 735
5.1.4.4. The definite article in inalienable possession constructions 742
5.1.5. The negative article geen ‘no’ 748
5.1.5.1. The semantics of geen ‘no’ 749
5.1.5.1.1. Negative quantification and scope 749
5.1.5.1.2. Specificity and genericity 753
5.1.5.1.3. Special semantics 754
5.1.5.2. Distribution of geen inside the noun phrase 761 5.1.5.3. The syntactic distribution of (noun phrases containing) geen 769
5.2. Pronouns 772
5.2.1. Personal pronouns 774
5.2.1.1. Referential personal pronouns 774
5.2.1.1.1. The paradigm 774
5.2.1.1.2. Interpretation 776
5.2.1.1.3. Nominal features 780
5.2.1.1.4. Subject and object forms 782
5.2.1.1.5. Weak and strong forms 783
5.2.1.1.6. Modification 789
5.2.1.2. Interrogative personal pronouns 790
5.2.1.3. Quantificational personal pronouns 793
5.2.1.4. Relative personal pronouns 802
5.2.1.5. Reflexive and reciprocal personal pronouns 805
5.2.2. Possessive pronouns 819
5.2.2.1. Classification 819
5.2.2.1.1. Referential possessive pronouns 820
5.2.2.1.2. Interrogative and relative possessive pronouns 822
5.2.2.1.3. Quantificational possessive pronouns 823
5.2.2.1.4. Reciprocal possessive pronouns 823
5.2.2.1.5. Other cases 824
5.2.2.2. Interpretation 825
5.2.2.2.1. Partitioning of the denotation set of the head noun 826 5.2.2.2.2. Semantic relations between the pronoun and the noun phrase 829
5.2.2.3. Weak versus strong forms 831
5.2.2.4. Binding of referential possessive pronouns 831
5.2.2.5. Special cases 837
5.2.2.5.1. The semi-genitival construction: Jan z’n boek ‘Jan’s book’ 837
5.2.2.5.2. Nominalized possessive pronouns 840
5.2.2.5.3. Idioms and fixed combinations 842
5.2.2.6. Differences between possessive pronouns and possessive van-PPs 844
5.2.3. Demonstrative pronouns 845
5.2.3.1. Classification 846
5.2.3.1.1. Demonstratives as modifiers 846
5.2.3.1.2. Demonstratives as arguments 851
5.2.3.1.3. The demonstrative dat as a predicate 854
5.2.3.2. Special cases 854
5.2.3.2.1. Idiomatic case-inflected forms 855
5.2.3.2.2. Distal demonstrative pronouns 855
5.2.3.2.3. Proximate demonstrative pronouns 863
5.2.3.2.4. The non-D-linked demonstratives zo’n and zulke used as amplifiers 864 5.2.3.2.5. The emphatic modifier zelf ‘himself’ 864
5.3. Bibliographical notes 867
Introduction
This chapter will discuss the semantic and syntactic behavior of the determiners. In the current generative framework, it is generally taken for granted that a determiner defines its own endocentric °projection in the structure of the noun phrase; cf.
Abney (1987). It is taken to be the head of a so-called DETERMINER PHRASE (DP), which is located on top of the projection of the head noun, NP. Schematically, example (1a) can be represented in labeled bracketing as in (1b), or as the tree diagram in (1c). Recall that we use the notion of “noun phrase” in a neutral way, whereas the notions DP and NP are used to refer to the substructures marked as such in (1b&c).
(1) a. de blauwe auto the blue car
b. [DP [D de] [NP blauwe auto]]
c. DP
D
de
NP
blauwe auto
The DP structure of noun phrases formally recognizes the fact that it is the determiner which is the syntactic head, and as such determines the referential/quantificational properties and the syntactic distribution of the noun phrase as a whole (apart, of course, from the semantic selection restrictions imposed by, e.g., the verb on the denotation of the head noun of its °complement).
There are two main types of determiners: articles and pronouns, which will be discussed in 5.1 and 5.2, respectively. Of course, noun phrases can also be introduced by a cardinal numeral or a quantifier like sommige ‘some’; these will not be discussed in this chapter, but in Chapter 6. Under the generally accepted assumption that a phrase has exactly one head, the claim that demonstrative and possessive pronouns are determiners, and hence occupy the D position of the DP, can be motivated by the fact that they are in complementary distribution with the articles, as well as with each other. It is impossible to simultaneously have, for instance, an article and a demonstrative pronoun in one DP. This is illustrated in (2) for combinations of two types of non-interrogative determiners; obviously, examples containing all three types of determiners are excluded as well.
(2) a. *het dit boek [article and demonstrative pronoun]
a′. *dit het boek
b. *het mijn boek [article and possessive pronoun]
b′. *mijn het boek
c. *dat mijn boek [possessive and demonstrative pronoun]
c′. *mijn dat boek
Note in passing, however, that the claim that articles and pronouns are both determiners is weakened by the fact that this does not seem to be universally valid:
some languages, like Italian or Greek, do not exhibit the complementary distribution of the Dutch articles and possessive/demonstrative pronouns; cf., e.g., Alexiadou et al. (2007: 93).
Personal pronouns are also included in this chapter because there are various reasons to consider them determiners as well. From a semantic point of view they resemble the determiners in having primarily a referring function: their descriptive content is limited and certainly does not exceed that of the possessive pronouns.
Furthermore, when it is assumed that personal pronouns are within the NP-domain, it cannot readily be accounted for that they cannot be preceded by an article or a demonstrative/possessive pronoun, whereas this follows immediately when they occupy the D-position; see, e.g., Longobardi (1994) and Alexiadou et al. (2007:
211/9) for more empirical support from Italian and Serbo-Croatian in favor of the claim that personal pronouns are determiners.
Before we begin discussing the articles in 5.1, we want to make some general comments on the structure of the noun phrase in (1). The NP in this structure can be said to determine the denotation of the noun phrase: it acts like a predicate, and can therefore be represented as a set of entities which have in common that they satisfy the description provided by the NP; the NP blauwe auto ‘blue car’ denotes the set of entities that have the properties of being a car and being blue; cf. Section A1.3.
Determiners, on the other hand, are normally used to determine the reference of the noun phrase. A definite determiner like de in de blauwe auto ‘the blue car’, for example, expresses that the denotation set of the NP blauwe auto ‘blue car’ contains exactly one entity and that it is this entity that the speaker refers to. The fact that a definite determiner has this meaning leads us to the relation between language and reality.
The relation between language and reality has given rise to ardent debates, and we will certainly not try to resolve here all the issues that have been brought up. We want to point out, however, that many of the problems that have been discussed in these debates find their origin in the assumption that language is directly related to reality. Consider example (3). Given the generally accepted idea that a singular noun phrase containing a definite determiner like de refers to a unique entity, this example is problematic because the noun phrase de Nederlandse president ‘the Dutch president’ does not refer to an entity in the real world, which means that at first sight this example cannot be assigned a truth value.
(3) De Nederlandse president is een begaafde man.
the Dutch president is a gifted man
Another problem is that it seems beyond the powers of the language user to determine what reality actually is; if we want to make objective statements about reality, we have to go beyond our personal experience and enter the domain of science. The language user therefore does not refer to reality directly, but to his internalized CONCEPTION of reality, which is invoked in his speech acts. For example, a sentence like (3) can be seriously uttered by anyone who has the erroneous belief that the Dutch prime minister is the president of the Netherlands, and, consequently, the speaker will also assign a truth value to this sentence. In other words, by assuming that a noun phrase does not refer to entities in the material
world but to entities in the speaker’s internalized conceptualization of the material world, the reference problem in (3) dissolves.
Next, the question arises of what a language user is actually doing when he or she utters an example like (3). The definite article de expresses that in the speaker’s conception of reality there is a unique entity that has the property of being the Dutch president, and it is this entity that the property of being a gifted man is predicated of. Of course, this conception of reality may clash with the conception of reality held by the listener, who is then likely to correct the speaker by saying that the person in question is not the president but the prime minister. What this shows is that language users do not invoke knowledge of reality (which they may be assumed to lack), but knowledge of their internalized conceptualization of reality. Although the conceptualizations of reality may differ among individuals, there is generally sufficient overlap to make communication more or less successful: in fact, one might even argue that the goal of communication is to eliminate discrepancies between the conceptualizations of reality held by the participants in the discourse, by correcting or updating the knowledge encoded by these; cf. Verhagen (2005).
Often, the participants do not even exploit their full conceptualization of reality in discourse. This can be easily demonstrated by means of the noun phrase de blauwe auto ‘the blue car’. As we have claimed above, this noun phrase expresses that the set denoted by the NP blauwe auto ‘blue car’ contains exactly one member.
Since we can safely assume that every language user is aware of the fact that the set denoted by blauwe auto contains an extremely large number of entities, this knowl-edge is clearly not relevant. The participants in the discourse rather have a tacit agreement on the question what entities are relevant for the discussion in question;
this limited set of entities under discussion is often referred to as the DOMAIN OF DISCOURSE or DOMAIN D, which may be assumed to consist of the shared knowledge of the participants on the topic under discussion. And de blauwe auto expresses that, in this limited domain, the set of cars contains just a single member.
To summarize, we have claimed that there is no direct relation between language and reality. Instead, the two areas are only indirectly related by means of the language user’s internalized conception of the “real world”, and the assignment of truth-values is only based on the (correct or incorrect) knowledge encoded in this conception. In conversation, the assignment of truth-values is further restricted by domain D, the shared knowledge of the participants on the topic of discussion. This view on the relation between language and reality will be adopted in the discussion below.
5.1. Articles
Table 1 shows that Dutch has three overt articles: two definite ones, de and het, and one indefinite one, een. The definite articles are sensitive to gender and number distinctions: de is used with singular non-neuter and plural nouns, whereas the definite article het occurs with singular neuter nouns. These two definite articles can also be used with non-count nouns. The indefinite article een is sensitive to number only; it normally only occurs with singular count nouns. It has therefore been suggested that it has a phonetically empty plural/non-count counterpart, represented by “∅” in the table. That we are dealing with a null form is further supported by the
fact that both een and ∅ have a negative counterpart, which is geen ‘no’ in both
The definite and indefinite articles (de/het/een) are normally pronounced with a schwa (/ə/). Moreover, the initial consonant of the definite neuter article het is normally not pronounced. The weak (phonological reduced) form of het can be expressed orthographically by the apostrophe notation (cf. ’t), which is also available for the indefinite article een (cf. ’n). In careful speech (“officialese” and the like) or when the article is stressed, the neuter definite article can be pronounced as [hEt]; the indefinite article een can be pronounced with a full vowel [e:], and is then homophonous to the numeral één ‘one’.
(4) • Colloquial speech • Careful speech a. de: [də]
b. het/’t: [ət] b′. het: [ht]
c. een/’n: [ən] c′. een: [e:n]
d. geen: [e:n]
Unlike the German articles, the Dutch articles do not decline; apart from some historical relics, their form is invariant in all syntactic environments. This is shown for the definite non-neuter article de in the primeless examples in (5), but the same thing holds for the other articles. The primed examples give the German translations of the Dutch examples for comparison.
c. Ik heb de man het boek aangeboden.
c′. Ich habe demdat Mann das Buch angeboten.
I have the man the book prt.-offered
According to the DP structure of noun phrases, the article is the syntactic head of the noun phrase, and as such is responsible for several semantic (and syntactic) properties of the noun phrase as a whole. These semantic properties of definite and indefinite articles are discussed in Section 5.1.1. Section 5.1.2 discusses noun phrases that normally do not contain an article, such as noun phrases consisting of a proper noun; in this section, special emphasis will be put on those cases that exceptionally do license an article. Section 5.1.3 continues with a brief discussion of definite articles with acronyms and abbreviations, and Section 5.1.4 discusses articles exhibiting deviant semantics. This section concludes in 5.1.5 with a section entirely devoted to the negative article geen: this is motivated by the fact that geen exhibits several properties that set it apart from the other articles.
5.1.1. Noun phrases headed by an article
This section discusses and illustrates the semantic properties of the definite and indefinite articles. We will start by defining the core meaning of the articles, after which we will discuss the interpretations these articles trigger on the complete noun phrase in general terms: consecutively, we will discuss the notions of definiteness, specificity, distributivity and genericity. The notions of definiteness and specificity will also play an important role in Chapter 6, where the meaning of the definite and indefinite articles are compared to the meaning of numerals and quantifiers.
5.1.1.1. The core meaning of the articles
The easiest way to explain the core meaning of the articles is by using Figure 1 from Section 1.1.2.2.1, repeated below, which can be used to represent the subject-predicate relation in a clause. In this figure, A represents the denotation set of the subject NP and B the set denoted by the verb phrase. The intersection A ∩ B denotes the set of entities for which the proposition expressed by the clause is claimed to be true. In an example like Jan wandelt op straat, for example, it is claimed that the set denoted by A, viz. {Jan}, is properly included in set B, which is constituted by people walking in the street. In other words, it expresses that A (A ∩ B) = ∅.
A B
A ∩ B
Figure 1: Set-theoretic representation of the subject-predicate relation
The core function of the determiners is to specify the intersection (A ∩ B) and the remainder of set A, that is, A - (A ∩ B). The definite article de/het ‘the’ in (6) expresses that in the domain of discourse (domain D), all entities that satisfy the description of the NP are included in the intersection A ∩ B, that is, that A - (A ∩ B) = ∅. The singular noun phrase de jongen ‘the boy’ in (6a) has therefore approximately the same interpretation as the proper noun Jan in the discussion above; it expresses that the cardinality of A ∩ B is 1 (for which we will use the notation: |A ∩ B| = 1). The only difference between the singular and the plural example in (6) is that the latter expresses that |A ∩ B| ≥ 1.
(6) a. De jongen loopt op straat.
the boy walks in the.street
a′. de/het Nsg: |A ∩ B| = 1 & A - (A ∩ B) = ∅ b. De jongens lopen op straat.
the boys walk in the.street
b′. de Npl: |A ∩ B| ≥ 1 & A - (A ∩ B) = ∅
The semantic contribution of the indefinite articles in (7a&b) is to indicate that A ∩ B is not empty; they do not imply anything about the set A - (A ∩ B), which may or may not be empty. The difference between the singular indefinite article een and the (phonetically empty) plural indefinite article ∅ is that the former expresses that |A ∩ B| = 1, whereas the latter expresses that |A ∩ B| ≥ 1.
(7) a. Er loopt een jongen op straat.
there walks a boy in the.street
‘There is a boy walking in the street.’
a′. een Nsg: |A ∩ B| = 1 & |A - (A ∩ B)| ≥ 0 b. Er lopen ∅ jongens op straat.
there walk boys in the.street
‘There are boys walking in the street.’
b′. ∅ Npl: |A ∩ B| ≥ 1 & |A - (A ∩ B)| ≥ 0
It is important to note that only parts of the meaning descriptions in the primed examples of (6) and (7) are inherently linked to the determiner: definite articles imply that A - (A ∩ B) = ∅, whereas indefinite articles do not. The claims with respect to the cardinality of the intersection A ∩ B do not come from the articles but from the number (singular versus plural) marking on the nouns: singular marking expresses that |A ∩ B| = 1, whereas plural marking expresses that |A ∩ B| ≥ 1. It is therefore not surprising that the difference between definite and indefinite noun phrases headed by a non-count like wijn ‘wine’ is that the former refers to a contextually determined amount of wine, whereas the latter simply refers to an indeterminate amount of wine.
The meaning that we attribute to the number marking, which is due to Farkas &
De Swart (2008), may come as a surprise. First, the meaning attributed in (7a) to the singular indefinite noun phrase breaks with the tradition in formal semantics that translates the indefinite article by means of the existential °operator ∃x, which implies that the article expresses that the intersection A ∩ B contains at least one
member, that is, |A ∩ B| ≥ 1. Second, (7b) attributes this meaning instead to the plural marking, which seems to conflict with the fact that plural nouns are normally interpreted as expressing that the intersection A ∩ B contains more than one member, that is, |A ∩ B| > 1. Below, we will therefore motivate why we adopt the proposal by Farkas & De Swart (who actually assume that the plural marking is ambiguous and can express either |A ∩ B| ≥ 1 or |A ∩ B| > 1, but we will ignore this here).
The traditional assumption that indefinite singular noun phrases express that
|A ∩ B| ≥ 1 predicts that a speaker would use an indefinite singular noun phrase when he has no clue about the cardinality of a certain set. The proposal here, according to which the plural marking on the noun expresses that |A ∩ B| ≥ 1, on the other hand, predicts that the speaker would use an indefinite plural noun phrase in that case. That the latter prediction is correct becomes clear when we consider the questions in (8): when a speaker is interested whether the addressee is a parent, that is, whether the addressee has one or more children, the typical way to ask the question would be as given in (8a), not as in (8b).
(8) a. Heb je kinderen?
have you children
‘Do you have children?’
b. #Heb je een kind?
have you a child
‘Do you have a child?’
Example (8b) is, of course, not ungrammatical but can only be used when the speaker presupposes that the cardinality of the referent set will not be larger that one: so one could ask a question like Heb je al een kind? ‘Do you already have a child?’ when the presupposition is that under normal circumstances the addressee would be childless. For the same reason, examples like (9a) require that the singular be used, given that this expresses that the speaker is aware of the fact that people normally have just one nose; using the plural would violate Grice’s (1975) maxim of quantity as this would wrongly suggest that the speaker lacks this knowledge.
Similarly, by opting for one of the options in (9b) may make more explicit what the speaker actually desires, a single cigarette or, e.g., a packet of cigarettes.
(9) a. Heb jij een mooie neus/#mooie neuzen?
have you a beautiful nose/beautiful noses
‘Do you have a beautiful nose/beautiful noses?’
b. Heb je een sigaret/sigaretten voor me?
have you a cigarette/cigarettes for me
‘Do you have a cigarette/cigarettes for me?’
Another context that licenses the use of a plural indefinite noun phrase involves clauses containing the modal willen ‘to want’. Consider the two examples in (10):
Another context that licenses the use of a plural indefinite noun phrase involves clauses containing the modal willen ‘to want’. Consider the two examples in (10):