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Re: CHAT: Definite/Indefinite Article Distinction

From:daniel andreasson <danielandreasson@...>
Date:Sunday, September 8, 2002, 18:20
Tom Wier wrote:

> This is, IIRC, precisely the opposite of what I heard from > *my* professor, Jerald Sadock: most languages with indefinite > articles have definites, but not the other way around. He > could of course be entirely wrong, so I'd be interested to > see what you find.
D'oh! Hehe. That's what I meant. (And I'm supposed to be a Mensan... :P ). The occurrence of an indefinite article implies the occurrence of a definite article. If INDEF then DEF, so to speak. Anyway. My point was that the number of languages that have an indefinite article is probably lower than languages that have a definite article (as the implicational universal above implies). So if a language has a DEF then it most likely has an INDEF. That means that if the number of languages with DEF is 8%, then that figure isn't likely to be higher if we include the INDEF-langs, since it's probably the same languages that have the INDEF. If you see what I mean (I'm not even sure that *I* see what I mean... :) ||| daniel -- "You can't post that on the Internet, you don't even know if it's true!" - Lisa Simpson to Homer.