Definiteness in articleless Slavic languages

该项目旨在帮助我们理解在一个缺乏核心正式工具之一（即冠词）的语言系统中如何管理对象的引用。更具体地说，该项目研究了三种无冠词斯拉夫语言（捷克语，波兰语和俄语）中的语法范畴。在这些语言中，可以说“玛丽买了一本书”，而名义上的“书”有明确或不明确的解释。该项目的主要目标是确定在没有条款的情况下如何表达明确性。该项目集中在两个潜在的最系统的手段表达明确：词序和指示词。词序影响无冠词名词的有定性（在“Boy arrived”中，“boy”比“Arrived boy”更有可能是有定性的）这一事实通常被归因于这样一种观点，即词序是信息结构的指数，而信息结构-例如名词的信息旧或新的质量-决定了名词的有定性。该项目还考虑并提出了一个竞争性假设，即语序和限定性之间存在更直接的映射，特别是无冠词名词根据其在句子中的位置而具有不同的语法表示。至于指示词，该项目侧重于他们的句法，语义和语用的亲定冠词和指示词的语言与文章。指示词有两个主要功能：（1）表达与话语（或语言外）所指对象的关系;（2）将谓语名词转换为个体名词（本质上是冠词的功能）。该项目研究的假设是，指示词在语言中的文章是一定要表达这两个功能在同一时间，而指示词在语言中没有文章也可以表达他们在隔离。这就解释了指示词在无冠词语言中相对广泛的分布。该项目的进一步目标是通过系统地激发大量母语者的直觉来产生新的实验数据。计划中的实验将为相关的理论问题（不带冠词和带指示词的名词的解释和分布）提供新的线索，并将为进一步的理论化提供新的经验概括。

The project aims to contribute to our understanding of how reference to objects is managed in a linguistic system that lacks one of the core formal instruments, namely articles. More particularly, the project investigates the grammatical category of definiteness in three articleless Slavic languages: Czech, Polish, and Russian. In these languages, it is possible to say the equivalent of "Mary bought book" with the nominal "book" having either a definite or an indefinite interpretation. The main objective of the project is to determine how definiteness is expressed in the absence of articles. The project concentrates on two potentially most systematic means of expressing definiteness: word order and demonstratives. The fact that word order influences the definiteness of articleless nominals (in "Boy arrived", "boy" is more likely to be definite than in "Arrived boy") has typically been attributed to the idea that word order is an exponent of information structure and it is information structure - e.g. the quality of the nominal as informationally old or new - that determines the nominal's (in)definiteness. The project also considers and works out a competing hypothesis that there is a more direct mapping between word order and definiteness, in particular the idea that articleless nominals have a different grammatical representation, depending on their position in the sentence. As regards demonstratives, the project focuses on their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic affinity to definite articles and demonstratives in languages with articles. Demonstratives have been argued to serve two main functions: (i) the expression of a relation to a discourse (or extra-linguistic) referent and (ii) the shift of predicate nominals to individual-denoting nominals (essentially the function of an article). The project investigates the hypothesis that demonstratives in languages with articles are bound to express both functions at the same time, while demonstratives in languages without articles can also express them in isolation. This accounts for the relatively broader distribution of demonstratives in articleless languages. The project further aims to produce novel experimental data by a systematic elicitation of the intuition of a large number of native speakers. The planned experiments will shed new light on the relevant theoretical issues (interpretation and distribution of nominals without articles and with demonstratives) and will contribute new empirical generalizations that can feed further theorizing.