Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: Indefinite articles are generally used to introduce new or unfamiliar entities to the discourse. However, in noun phrases such as een opgeluchte Obama ‘a relieved Obama’, the proper noun denotes a familiar individual who does not even have to be new in the discourse. Yet, an indefinite article is used in this construction. We have conducted a corpus study in written Dutch and a production experiment in order to find out the characteristics of this construction as well as its definite counterpart. We will show that the denotation of the adjective plays a crucial role in the semantic composition of the construction, and that preferences for either a definite or an indefinite article correlate with differences in the duration of the state denoted by the adjective. We will use semantic type-theory to account for these findings.
Source: Linguistics in the Netherlands
DOI: 10.1075/avt.32.06hoo
Authors: Helen de Hoop, Erica Kemperman
Institution: Radboud University Nijmegen
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W2461528104