Abstract
Shan, a Southwestern Tai language spoken in Myanmar, Thailand, and nearby countries, uses bare nouns to express both unique and anaphoric definiteness, a definiteness distinction identified by [15]. This novel data pattern from the author’s fieldwork can be analyzed by adding an anaphoric type shifter, \(\iota ^x\), to the available type shifting operations defined by [6] and [7]. Otherwise, the data from Shan fit well with predictions from a type shifting analysis as laid out by [8]. Additionally, this paper demonstrates that the consistency test [7] is not sufficient to determine what counts as a definite determiner for a language.
Thanks to Nan San Hwam, Mai Hong, and Sai Loen Kham who provided the Shan data. Thanks also to Sarah Murray, Miloje Despic, the Cornell Semantics Group, and my reviewers for all their feedback. Any errors are my own.
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Notes
- 1.
A review noted that what [15] calls ‘part-whole’ bridging would more correctly be called ‘whole-part’ bridging, and agreeing with their assessment, I will use that and ‘product-producer’ instead of ‘producer-product’ for the same reasons.
- 2.
Data for this paper comes from the author’s fieldwork with the Shan language in Chiang Mai, Thailand from January 2018 to present, working primarily with a speaker from Keng Tawng City in Shan State, Myanmar, who has lived in Thailand for over 10 years. Data was collected using a variety of elicitation methods: story translation, stories based on storyboards, felicity judgments on grammatical sentences in specific contexts, following techniques described in [3].
- 3.
[15] also notes that in cases where a weak definite article can refer anaphorically, the role of the referent is a topic in that it is ‘the one that the story is about’ (47).
- 4.
Glossing conventions: 1: first person, 3: third person, cl: classifier, comp: complementizer, inf: informal, impf: imperfect, irr: irrealis, neg: negation, pass: passive, pl: plural, prf: perfect, prt: particle, sg: singular.
- 5.
Another individual, the store owner, is introduced in the story because otherwise the most natural thing to use anaphorically is the pronoun mán-tsáaj (‘him’).
- 6.
As [1] note for Akan and [2] notes for Bulu, a possessive construction seems required to do whole-part bridging in those languages. The contrast between cases like (16), where a bare noun seems to be an option, and cases like (17), where a possessive construction seems to be required suggest this possibility should be investigated in more depth for Shan.
- 7.
[6] would predict that a wide scope existential reading in cases where a kind and definite reading is blocked. This has not been tested yet.
- 8.
This definition differs from [15] in that the index is defined as a property rather than an individual, but I will not be concerned with this distinction for this analysis.
- 9.
Mandarin passes the consistency test too, but the data is not included here to conserve space.
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Moroney, M. (2019). Definiteness with Bare Nouns in Shan. In: Sikos, J., Pacuit, E. (eds) At the Intersection of Language, Logic, and Information. ESSLLI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11667. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-59620-3_7
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