Re: Definiteness
| From: | Paul Bennett <paul.w.bennett@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, March 2, 2008, 19:49 |
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On Sun, 02 Mar 2008 05:51:05 -0500, Mr Veoler <veoler@...> wrote:
> One thing I have had in mind to ask: What about definiteness?
>
> The definite article, and a generic demonstrative - what's the
> difference?
Semantically, very little, if any.
I suspect you could replace every demonstrative "that" and every "the" in
English both with "bleen" and be just as expressive and concise (once the
listener knew what "bleen" meant).
> Generally, my conlang have the unmarked noun to be "indefinite" in the
> broader
> sense, and might be used for what in English is definite, if the context
> is
> enough. And then I have two marked articles: one for definiteness, used
> when
> you want to make it explicitly definite, as a generic demonstrative, and
> the
> second article for genericness (as in Latejami).
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
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
Type 2: I'm looking for the house
Paul
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