Defining Definiteness in Turoyo

What it is about

The paper extends Schwarz's typology of definite articles from "strong" and "weak" to also "super-weak", and gives a method to test for the last type. The test uses questionnaires and interviews on Turoyo, an endangered Neo-Aramaic variety of Ṭur Abdin, whose definite article is ʼi (feminine) or ʼu (masculine), written in Syriac script with alap-heh plus yod or waw. The data show a wide distribution of the article, including anti-uniqueness effects with exclusives ("not the only" readings), and definiteness spreading with demonstratives and possessives. Superlative adjectives compete with the article for its syntactic slot. The authors propose a cline of articles ordered by entailment, in which stronger articles entail weaker ones; this also explains the anaphoric uses. The paper is an article, not a book; all of the above comes from its main text.

Ideas

• I1. A presupposition check instead of a uniqueness check: the definite is licensed when the set of satisfiers has at most one member (the super-weak entry), and an exclusive or a "not the only" sentence is read as a test of that. In prag, a definite NP whose head has several satisfiers in the world should be marked and not rejected.
• I2. A test set of environments for the Neo-Aramaic article: part-whole bridging (weak), product-producer bridging (strong), exclusives, superlatives, and demonstrative co-occurrence. Each test sentence gets an expected class; the questionnaire design of the paper is the model.
• I3. A feature bundle for the cline in the lexicon: each article form lists which environments it may occur in, so that a rule can read off the weakest article that fits a context.

For Mova

I1 belongs to prag (the definiteness check) and to the world layer, where a definite is looked up as a unique referent. I2 and I3 belong in The noun in Biblical Aramaic (a Neo-Aramaic note on the definite article) and in The Aramaic family and the Jewish varieties, since Turoyo is not yet a chapter of its own.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.5874

@article{yifrach2021defining,
  title = {{Defining Definiteness in Turoyo}},
  author = {Yifrach, Miriam and Coppock, Elizabeth},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.5874},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5874}
}

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