Languages with articles indicating the definiteness or indefiniteness of noun phrases sometimes allow certain forms to occur without articles. In several such cases that are examined here, the expressions without articles are neither definite nor indefinite in and of themselves, but can be interpreted either way in one context or another. One case from Old Norse and two cases from English that work this way will be discussed. But the direct correlation between the presence of an overt article and an indication of (in)definiteness, and the absence of an article and the lack of such an indication cannot be maintained. Proper names without an article are definite, and count noun plurals and mass noun singulars are indefinite without an article.

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Ellen F. Prince Gregory Ward, Betty J. Birner, Laurence R. Horn, Barbara Abbott, Pauline Jacobson, and Jerrold M. Sadock Ellen F. Prince, president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2008 and a major figure in the fields of discourse, pragmatics, and information structure, died peacefully in her home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 24, 2010, of lung cancer. She was sixty-six. At the time of her death, Ellen was Professor Emeritus (she would have eschewed the title ‘Emerita’) of Linguistics, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer and Information Science, at the University of Pennsylvania, where she had been a faculty member from 1974 until her retirement in 2005. Ellen was born Ellen Deanna Friedman on February 29, 1944, in the Flatbush1 neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, the only child of Irving and Jeannette (née Rothkopf) Friedman. As a leap day baby, she enjoyed only sixteen birthdays in her sixty-six years, the last being on February 29, 2008, on which date friends gathered to celebrate her ‘Sweet Sixteen’. Growing up in Brooklyn, she attended Walt Whitman Junior High School for only two years, having skipped eighth grade, and Erasmus Hall High School for four years. In 1960, she enrolled in Brooklyn College, where she received a B.A. in French in 1964. Always interested in language, she completed an M.A. thesis in 1967 also at Brooklyn College, translating and commenting on an Anglo-Norman manuscript under the supervision of Wallace Lipton, while at the same time studying linguistics at New York University in 1966–67. In the fall of 1967 she enrolled in the Linguistics Ph.D. program at the University of Pennsylvania, where her husband Gerald Prince (whom she met in a French poetry class at Brooklyn College and married on June 25, 1967) had been hired as an Instructor of French and where he is currently Professor of Romance Languages. At Penn, she studied under Zellig Harris, the founder of its linguistics department and inventor of transformational grammar. In 1974, she completed her dissertation, which provided a formal analysis of tense and aspect within a Harrisian framework, and was hired at Penn as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics. She soon found herself growing disenchanted with the limitations of sentence-level syntax; at the same time, she was becoming increasingly fascinated with larger units of analysis, specifically the use of language in context and the pragmatic principles that govern the distribution of sentences in discourse. Ellen was inspired by the work of Susumu Kuno, who impressed upon her ‘the fact that the form of an utterance may well have something to do with the communicative intentions of the speaker’ (Prince 1988a:164, acknowledgment note). An early work of Ellen’s—‘A comparison of wh-clefts and it-clefts in discourse’ (1978)—showed this influence to good effect. At the time, these two constructions were viewed as interchangeable. Ellen showed that in fact their discourse functions and constraints are quite different; while the presupposed portion of wh-clefts expresses propositions assumed by the speaker to be in the conscious mind of their addressee, the same is not true of it-clefts, one subvariety of which actually uses the presupposed part to introduce new information to the addressee, an instance of what David Lewis was later to dub ‘accommodation’. [End Page 866] This paper exemplifies an important feature of Ellen’s work, which is her reliance on naturally occurring data. This was before the ready availability of large computerized corpora; almost all of the examples in her paper had been painstakingly collected by hand, either from books and newspapers or, occasionally, from conversations. Well before Google, much less electronic databases, Ellen was ready to enrich her own work or that of colleagues with the inclusion of a deftly selected, fully contextualized example captured in the wild and preserved on a handy index card. Ellen stressed that we human linguists are not very good at constructing or evaluating examples that require specific discourse conditions. Another paper of Ellen’s—‘On the inferencing of indefinite-this NPs’ (1981c)—shows her resourcefulness in finding naturally occurring spoken data. The bulk of the examples in this paper...

Challenges to the validity of the classical, truth-functional treatment of natural language connectives like English and, or, and if. then are numerous. One particularly striking one is found in Cooper 1978, viz If you throw switch S and switch T, the motor will start. Therefore, either if you throw switch S, the motor will start, or, if you throw switch T the motor will start. According to classical logic, this is a valid syllogism, an affront to our ordinary intuitions. In this paper, originally written more than twenty years ago, I show that a Gricean approach of the kind championed by Larry Horn can easily account for the huge discrepancy between the truth-functional treatment and our sense of what is conveyed by the words. Classical logic can be preserved in this case as in others by copious applications of pragmatic reasoning.

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Nominalist Theory of Eskimo: A Case Study in Scientific Self-DeceptionJerrold M. SadockJerrold M. SadockPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by International Journal of American Linguistics Volume 65, Number 4Oct., 1999 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/466400 Views: 7Total views on this site Citations: 6Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1999 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Valentina Vapnarsky, Edy Veneziano Lexical Polycategoriality: Cross-linguistic, cross-theoretical and language acquisition approaches, (Oct 2017): 1–31.https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.182.01valMarianne Mithun Polycategoriality and zero derivation, (Oct 2017): 155–174.https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.182.06mitJosé Andrés Alonso de la Fuente Review of Robbeets (2015): Diachrony of verb morphology: Japanese and the Transeurasian languages, Diachronica 33, no.44 (Dec 2016): 530–537.https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.33.4.04aloAnna Berge Chapter 11. Insubordination in Aleut, (Nov 2016): 283–309.https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.115.11berHein van der Voort The contribution of C.C. Uhlenbeck to Eskimo-Aleut linguistics, Études/Inuit/Studies 32, no.22 (Oct 2009): 85–105.https://doi.org/10.7202/038217ar Christiane Cunha de Oliveira Lexical Categories and The Status of Descriptives in Apinajé Cunha de Oliveira, International Journal of American Linguistics 69, no.33 (Jul 2015): 243–274.https://doi.org/10.1086/381336

Context-free phrase structure grammar (henceforth PSG) is capable of describing infinite languages consisting of finite strings drawn from a finite vocabulary and associating with each string of the target language a division into immediate constituents that can be represented as a labeled tree. This much, it would seem, is the least that we can expect of any grammar that would pretend to adequacy as a scheme for describing languages of the kind spoken by human beings. PSG has several advantages over competing systems of grammatical description. In particular: PSG is a conceptually simple formalism. Because PSG describes only a single level of analysis, movement rules and the constraints on them and triggers for them are eliminated. The ramifications of a postulated PSG rule are ordinarily immediately obvious and immediately testable against fact. PSG is completely formalizable. A finite set of rules and a finite vocabulary fully defines a PSG. The formal properties of such systems can be studied, and in fact there is a considerable formal literature on the subject. (See, for example Partee, et al. 1990 and the references it contains.). There are numerous interesting results concerning the classes of string sets and the classes of tree sets that PSGs are capable of specifying. PSG is computationally tractable. Quite efficient algorithms exist for parsing expressions in terms of PSGs. Though the parsing time of the best of these is still an exponential function of the length of the string, it is less disastrously so than for other formal grammar types.

Eskimo languages, as is well known, are ergative-absolutive .with respect to the case marking of the nominal terms of the clause: there is a special morphological case that marks the agent of a transitive clause, while the object of the transitive and the subject of an intransitive are in a different case. The case of the transitive agent is traditionally called the relative in Greenlandic studies (following Kleinschmidt 1968 (1851)), but I will refer to it as the ergative, since that is the term that is now more generally used in typological studies. The case of the transitive object and intransitive subject is the absolutive.