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Definiteness marking in Germanic: morphological variations on the same syntactic theme

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Abstract

The Germanic languages display a remarkable range of variation with respect to the interaction of the definite article and adjectival modification. In Swedish, Norwegian, and Faroese, adjectival modification causes, for instance, a doubling of the definite article. In languages like English, Dutch, and German, however, the definite article does not double. In addition to these two patterns, two other patterns can be distinguished (instantiated by Icelandic and Danish respectively). Despite this wide range of variation, I claim that that the syntactic derivation of definite DPs with an adjective is uniform across all Germanic languages. I argue that the presence of an adjective triggers movement of D over the adjective in order to meet the licensing requirement of the adjective. I argue that the cross-linguistic variation should be attributed to two non-syntactic factors. The first factor is whether the definite article is an affix or a free morpheme. The second one is the ordering of operations in a post-syntactic morphological component of the grammar. As far as the latter factor is concerned, I propose that two operations in this component, Chain Reduction and Local Dislocation, are not inherently ordered with respect to each other. Instead, languages display parametric variation with regard to which of these two operations is applied first. In combination with differences with respect to the first factor mentioned above, this accounts for the attested variation in definiteness marking. It also offers interesting new insights into the cross-linguistic distribution of possessor doubling.

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  1. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Bldg. 32-D808, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

    Erik Schoorlemmer

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Schoorlemmer, E. Definiteness marking in Germanic: morphological variations on the same syntactic theme. J Comp German Linguistics 15, 107–156 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-012-9048-5

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