Re: Intrusive Articles!

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003 00:34:26 +0200, Christian Thalmann <cinga@...> wrote:

>Intrusive articles -- while most certainly not an official
>linguistic term, it's what I call Jovian's most recent
>grammatical feature.
Wow! According to you examples and description I have
intrusive articles as well in my conlang. :-))))
Yet they are more excessive because they can even
occur separately for each apposition. It would look
like this:

I-GEN ART-DEF-GEN Garfield-APP ART-DEF-CONV cat-APP ART-INDEF friend-NOUN

Ok, for the abbreviations........

GEN=Genitive case
ART=Article
DEF=definite
GEN=general reference (to outside world)
CONV=conversation reference (to something said before)
APP=Apposition (narrows down the referent of the head noun -
    see my recent post on this topic)
INDEF=indefinite
NOUN=any part of speech that is a noun

So the phrase means:
a friend of mine who is the cat previously mentioned and also
is the Garfield that the speaker assumes the listener to know
in his/her real-world context (that is: despite any Garfield
that may have been mentioned during the ongoing discourse)

Phew... that's tough to describe! ;-)
So, I conclude: If you mix intrusively intrusive articles with an
especially peculiar concept of definiteness then it thoroughly
blows the human mind (mine for example, as I am writing this. *ggg*)

Cheers,
Harald
:-)))