Publications
Publication details [#67290]
Arsenijević, Boban. 2018. Atypical demonstratives in an articleless language. In Coniglio, Marco, Andrew Murphy, Eva Schlachter and Tonjes Veenstra, eds. Atypical demonstratives : Syntax, semantics and pragmatics (Linguistische Arbeiten 568). De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 161–196.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Language as a subject
Annotation
The paper introduces a variety of atypical use of demonstratives in Serbo-Croatian, recognizable as a type of demonstratives joined with markers of indefiniteness and characterized by distinct semantic effects. In addition to the empirical goal to present and describe this original use of demonstratives, the paper has the theoretical goal to analyze the empirical evidence and attempt to answer two questions. The first question relates to the range of referential properties of the situation pronoun, and the second question relates to the status of the DP projection in the structure of nominal expressions in an articleless language. It is argued that the semantic analysis should take into account the discourse⁃organizational and epistemic dimensions. As for the status of the DP projection in the nominal structure, the analysis corroborates the view that the projection is universal in the nominal structure of both types of languages, those with and without articles.