Feature 30. Presence and position of articles

found in question(s): 68

Definition and illustration

An article (Art) is defined here as an element which accompanies a noun and has indefinite or definite function. It can be either bound (clitic/affix) or unbound (free morpheme). Articles can either precede or follow the noun. For instance, English has Art-N order (a book, the book), while Kobon (East New Guinea) has N-Art order:

(1)

For languages that have both types of articles it needs to be investigated, whether definite and indefinite articles pattern the same. In principle, one may expect the two to pattern the same if they belong to the same word class. If not, one needs to check whether the two actually belong to the same part of speech. In some languages, the indefinite article is identical to the numeral 'one', suggesting that it belongs to a different word class, in which case one may expect the indefinite 'article' to pattern differently than the definite one. Different distributional patterns between definite and indefinite noun phrases need to be controlled for quite generally since indefinite noun phrases are often assumed to have less structure than definite ones.

The morphological form of the article also needs to be taken into consideration.

Correlations

Dryer (2007) claims that there is a weak correlation between the position of the article and basic word order. In particular, articles are more often before the noun (Art-N) in languages with V-O order and vice versa (N-Art & O-V).

For a better understanding of this correlation, two of the above-mentioned aspects (same or different category, morphological vs. syntactic object) need to be controlled for. Hence, depending on the classification of articles, one may expect correlations only for one type of article (i.e., the definite one). In addition, if an article occurs as clitic/affix, its positional behavior may not be indicative of the general word order rules of the language (which apply to independent syntactic objects). Thus, the strength of the correlation should also be checked if bound articles are set aside.

There is a controversy about the classification of articles as head of a DP or as dependent of an NP (see Salzmann 2020 for details.) The correlation proposed by Dryer could indicate that the analysis of articles as head is more appropriate.

In addition, there is, according to Dryer, a weak correlation in that articles tend to be more common in VO- than in OV-languages, but so far no concrete proposals have been advanced concerning possible underlying causes. Another prominent discussion in the literature concerns syntactic properties that correlate with the lack of articles (and hence the fact that noun phrases in those languages are NPs rather than DPs), see Bošković (2009).

References