Re: Definiteness
| From: | John Vertical <johnvertical@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, March 3, 2008, 10:51 |
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>In Terzemian, as IIRC in Spanish, I distinguish three articles:
>
>Type 0: Not definite to the speaker
>Type 1: Definite to the speaker, but the speaker does not know (or care?)
>whether it's definite to the listener
>Type 2: Definite to the speaker, and the speaker expects / wants it to be
>definite to the listener
And to make this fully orthogonal, one could add: not definit to the speaker
but definit to the lis'ner. Might be usable this way:
"So then the2 staircase was jammed..."
"Sorry, the3 what staircase?"
>English can express these, but not with absolute concision:
>
>Type 0: I'm looking for a house
>Type 1: I'm looking for a specific house
Or "this one house".
>Type 2: I'm looking for the house
>
>
>
>Paul
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Entirely distinct idea: I've been pondering if evidentials and articles
could be joined in a single part-of-speech. Sorry, don't have any results at
hand.
John Vertical