Institut for Lingvistik Aarhus Universitet Willemoesgade 15D DK-8200 Aarhus N Danmark Definiteness Marking in Danish A Corpus-Based Study of the Distribution of the Pre- and Postnominal Definite Articles Line Hove Mikkelsen Arskortnummer:˚ 921463 Speciale Hovedvejleder: Hans Arndt Ekstern vejleder: Ewan Klein September 1998 Contents in brief 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Whystudydefiniteness? . .... 1 1.2 Thebasicdata.................................... 2 1.3 The organisation of the thesis . ........ 3 2 The historical development of the Danish definite articles 5 2.1 The history of the Danish definite articles . ........... 5 2.2 Grammaticalization of the definite articles . ............. 7 3 The corpus study 12 3.1 Objective of the corpus study . ....... 12 3.2 The DANTAG Corpus .................................. 13 3.3 Extractingthedata ............................... 13 3.4 Markingupthedata................................ 16 3.5 Thetagset....................................... 18 3.6 Theresults...................................... 38 4 Transformational Approaches 48 4.1 Delsing’s SpecA-analysis . ....... 48 4.2 General problems with transformational analyses . .............. 56 4.3 Testing the clitic vs affix hood of the postnominal definiteness marker . 57 5 Formal Analysis 70 5.1 IntroductiontoHPSG.... ...... ..... ...... ...... ... 70 5.2 The Headedness of the Noun Phrase . ...... 75 5.3 The Representation of Definiteness . ......... 79 5.4 A Formal Analysis of the Danish data . ....... 82 6 Conclusion 104 Bibliography 106 Appendices 117 i Contents in detail Acknowledgements v Abbreviations vi 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Whystudydefiniteness? . .... 1 1.2 Thebasicdata.................................... 2 1.2.1 Terminology .................................. 3 1.3 The organisation of the thesis . ........ 3 2 The historical development of the Danish definite articles 5 2.1 The history of the Danish definite articles . ........... 5 2.2 Grammaticalization of the definite articles . ............. 7 2.2.1 Further grammaticalization of the postnominal article............. 8 2.2.2 Summary and further issues . ... 9 3 The corpus study 12 3.1 Objective of the corpus study . ....... 12 3.2 The DANTAG Corpus .................................. 13 3.3 Extractingthedata ............................... 13 3.3.1 Extracting the morphological definites . ......... 14 3.3.2 Extracting the syntactic definites . ........ 14 3.4 Markingupthedata................................ 16 3.4.1 ThebasicstructureofaDTD . 16 3.4.2 ExpandingtheDTD .............................. 17 3.4.3 Formatting the corpora . 17 3.5 Thetagset....................................... 18 3.5.1 Sentences.................................... 18 3.5.2 NounPhrases.................................. 18 3.5.2.1 Constituency tests . 19 3.5.2.2 NPattributes............................. 20 3.5.2.2.1 The type attribute . 20 3.5.2.2.2 The demo attribute . 20 3.5.2.2.3 The coord attribute . 21 3.5.2.2.4 The marked attribute . 22 3.5.2.2.4.1 DateNPs ..................... 22 3.5.2.2.4.2 Idiomatic phrases . 23 ii 3.5.2.2.4.3 Measure phrases . 24 3.5.2.2.4.4 Partitives . 25 3.5.2.2.4.5 Proper nouns . 25 3.5.3 Pre-determiners............................... 27 3.5.4 Definitearticles............................... 28 3.5.5 Demonstrative Determiners . 28 3.5.6 AdjectivePhrases.. ...... ..... ...... ...... ..... 29 3.5.7 Nouns...................................... 30 3.5.8 Appositives................................... 31 3.5.9 AdverbialPhrases .............................. 32 3.5.10 Prepositional Phrases . ..... 33 3.5.11 RelativeClauses .. ...... ..... ...... ...... ..... 33 3.5.11.1 Restrictedness .... ..... ...... ...... ..... .. 35 3.5.11.2 Reduced ............................... 37 3.5.12 At-clauses.................................... 37 3.5.13 Conjunctions ................................. 38 3.6 Theresults...................................... 38 3.6.1 The quantitative results . ..... 38 3.6.1.1 The interaction of definiteness marking and relative clause attributes 39 3.6.1.1.1 Restrictedness and definiteness marking . 39 3.6.1.1.2 Definiteness marking and reduced RCs . 41 3.6.1.2 Idioms and definiteness marking . 42 3.6.2 The qualitative results . 43 3.6.2.1 Adjective phrases and definiteness marking . ...... 43 3.6.2.2 At-clauses .............................. 45 3.6.2.3 MeasurePhrases... ..... ...... ...... ..... .. 46 4 Transformational Approaches 48 4.1 Delsing’s SpecA-analysis . ....... 48 4.1.1 Arguments in favour of the SpecA-analysis . ........ 50 4.1.2 Theoretical problems with the SpecA-analysis . ........... 52 4.2 General problems with transformational analyses . .............. 56 4.3 Testing the clitic vs affix hood of the postnominal definiteness marker . 57 4.3.1 Selectivity ................................... 57 4.3.2 Irregularities ................................ 59 4.3.2.1 Definiteness marking of proper nouns . 59 4.3.2.2 Some lexical gaps in postnominal definiteness marking ...... 61 4.3.3 Morphophonological idiosyncrasies . ........ 62 4.3.3.1 Words ending in -el, -en or -er ................... 63 4.3.3.2 Loan words in -(i)um and -(i)us ................... 63 4.3.4 Semantic idiosyncrasies . 64 4.3.4.1 ‘Verden’ ............................... 64 4.3.4.2 ‘Iforvejen’.............................. 65 4.3.4.3 Comparison with the genitive . 65 4.3.5 Participation in syntactic rules . ........ 65 4.3.6 Relativeordering .............................. 67 4.3.7 Summinguptheevidence . 68 iii 5 Formal Analysis 70 5.1 IntroductiontoHPSG.... ...... ..... ...... ...... ... 70 5.1.1 Signs ...................................... 70 5.1.2 Schemas .................................... 73 5.1.3 Principles.................................... 74 5.2 The Headedness of the Noun Phrase . ...... 75 5.3 The Representation of Definiteness . ......... 79 5.3.1 Definiteness as a feature . 80 5.4 A Formal Analysis of the Danish data . ....... 82 5.4.1 A sample of lexical entries . 83 5.4.2 Appositive at-clauses.............................. 90 5.4.2.1 Revisions to the basic analysis . 94 5.4.2.2 Om asamarker ........................... 96 5.4.3 Measurephrases ................................ 98 5.4.4 Summary and residual issues . 101 6 Conclusion 104 Bibliography 106 Appendices 117 A DTD 117 B The Corpus Results 119 C The Chi-Square Test 122 D Restrictiveness 124 E Reducedness 125 F Restrictiveness and reducedness 126 G Idiomaticity 127 H NPs per Sentence 128 I At-Clauses 129 J Measure Phrases 133 K Distributional gaps 135 L Partial Sort Hierarchy for Danish Markers 139 M MorphCorpus 140 N SynCorpus 195 iv Acknowledgements While this thesis is submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of Aarhus, most of the work reported here and all of the writing was carried out during my year as a visiting student at the Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh. A number of people in both departments have been involved in my work on this thesis and I would like to express my gratitude to them here. As a result of being a visiting student during my final year, I have enjoyed the great fortune of having not one, but two excellent supervisors, Hans Arndt in Denmark and Ewan Klein here in Edinburgh. My sincerest thanks to both of them for detailed advice, comments and, not least, constant encouragement throughout these past twelve months. Thanks to Søren Harder and Thomas Bilgram at the Department of Linguistics in Aarhus for detailed assistance with the corpus study and various other computational and practical issues. I would also like to thank all staff and students at the Centre for Cognitive Science for making it such a brilliant place to work and be; special thanks are due to Ash Asudeh, Frank Keller, Mirella Lapata, Alex Lascarides, Jesse Tseng, and Simone Teufel. A number of people from outside have also contributed to this thesis in important ways. Thanks to Per Anker Jensen (HHS) and Anne Neville (KU) for initial stimulation and discussion of the ideas that presented in this thesis, and thanks to Kersti B¨orjars, Lars-Oluf Delsing, Claire Grover, Nina Grønnum, Caroline Heycock, Bob Ladd, Asifa Majid, Geoff Pullum, Ivan A. Sag, Barbara Partee, and Roberto Zamparelli for help in ways too numerous to list here. Finally, a special thanks to Lex Holt, Will L¨owe and Frank Keller for their patient help and guid- ance with the formatting and layout of this thesis. The work reported here was supported by a grant from the University of Aarhus Research Foun- dation. v Abbreviations In glosses COM common gender COMP complementizer COMP MORPH compounding morpheme DEF definite EMPH REFL emphatic reflexive GEN genitive NEU neuter PART particle PAS passive (verb morphology) PLU plural REFL reflexive RP relative pronoun SING singular In HPSG HFP Head Feature Principle ValP Valence Principle AVM Attribute Value Matrix ADJ ADJUNCT CAT CATEGORY CONT CONTENT DTR DAUGHTER LOC LOCAL PRD PREDICATIVE RESTIND RESTRICTED-INDEX det determiner bse base (bare infinitive verb form) fin finite mark marker prep preposition Bibliographical H&T Hopper and Traugott (1993) P&S Pollard and Sag (1994) Z&P Zwicky and Pullum (1983) vi Chapter 1 Introduction This thesis is a case study of definiteness marking in Danish. I will primarily be concerned with the morphosyntactic aspects of definiteness marking, in particular the distribution of the pre- and postnominal definite articles with respect to other features of the noun phrase. I will be less concerned with the semantic, pragmatic and discourse properties of definiteness, though these issues invariably surface in various