NP/DP Parameter and (In)definiteness in Articleless Languages

This paper explores how the definite interpretation is derived in articleless languages. The first half of the paper discusses the existence/absence of D across languages and compares some aritcleless languages with respect to its strength. The discussion is centered around several prominent properties: left branch extraction, radical pro-drop, subject-object asymmetries, Neg-raising, focus-verb adjacency, focus morphology on negative constituents, and majority reading of superlatives. The discussions strongly lead us to the conclusion that Korean is an NP-language. In line with Syed and Simpson’s (2017) claim that word order does not necessarily require DP-structure in the relevant language, this paper argues that definite interpretations can come from many sources (Phan and Lander 2015). The second half discusses on how definite and indefinite interpretations are semantically derived from bare nominal expressions in articleless languages such as Korean and Hindi, and leads to the conclusion that both Korean and Hindi bare nominals produce the same patterns of ambiguities such as generic, definite, and non-specific indefinite readings. Our proposals to account for the occurrence of such ambiguities are summarized as follows: (i) Bare singular forms are a representative of bare nominals. (ii) Bare nominals are identified as non-indefiniteness in terms of such diagnostics as anaphoricity, homogeneity, partitive specificity, referential specificity, and scope inertness phenomena, since they neither take intermediate scope nor obligatorily take narrow scope, as opposed to genuine indefinites. (iii) Bare nominals cannot introduce new entities into the discourse, since they are simply definites. (iv) Bare nominals can denote kinds (generics) when combined with a kind-level predicate. (v) The perceived indefiniteness of bare nominals can be derived from complex predicate formation or in the non-topic situation where definite readings fail to arise.