Chapter 6
The suffix that makes Persian nouns unique
Although it is widely acknowledged that Tehrani Persian (often broadly labeled as Persian) has no dedicated marker of definiteness, the nominal suffix -e has been analyzed as a colloquial definiteness marker. Here I show that -e can mark bare nominals to ensure a definite interpretation, but it can also appear on indefinites marked by the indefinite determiner ye. I show that indefinites marked by -e are scopally inert. To unify the effect of -e on definites and indefinites, I propose that -e introduces a uniqueness implication on the nominal it modifies. More specifically, N-e denotes a singleton set of objects. On a bare nominal, this uniqueness implication ensures a definite interpretation. On an indefinite, it restricts the domain of quantification to a singleton, making the indefinite scopally inert. I present a compositional account of definite and indefinite constructions with -e in Tehrani Persian.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Bare nominal vs. specific definite
- 3.Simple indefinite vs. specific indefinite
- 4.Specificity
- 5.Common ground effects
- 6.Analysis
- 7.Conclusion
-
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Matsuoka, Daiki, Daisuke Bekki & Hitomi Yanaka
2024.
Appositive Projection as Implicit Context Extension in Dependent Type Semantics. In
Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics [
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 14569],
► pp. 224 ff.
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