ALS 2010 Annual Conference Programme - Australian Linguistic ...

Specificity necessarily involves operator movement to a specifier position. Hence
the DP final position of the Specificity marker in MC (and the occurrence of suffixes
in other languages that mark Specificity, e.g. Turkish).
This paper represents the early stages of a comparative study of definiteness and
specificity marking, and my claim warrants further cross-linguistic research. Some
of the languages that lack a definite article include Chinese, Japanese, Malay,
Russian, Turkish, as well as the creole languages of the Caribbean. My analysis
provides evidence of the mapping of form and function, and of parallel structures
of DP and CP. My claim has implications for the typology of languages with respect
to the marking of Definiteness and or Specificity.
References
Campbell, Richard. 1996. Specificity operators in SpecDP. Studia Linguistica 50:161-188.
Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA.: M.I.T. Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 2001a. Beyond explanatory adequacy: MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics, No. 20, 1-25. Cambridge,
MA: Distributed by MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.
Chomsky, Noam. 2001b. Derivation by phase. In Ken Hale: A life in language, ed. Michael Kenstowicz, 1-52. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Partee, Barbara H. 1986. Noun Phrase interpretation and Type-Shifting Principles. In Studies in Discourse Representation
Theory and the Theory of Generalized Quantifiers, eds. Jeroen Groenendijk, Dick de Jongh and Martin Stokhof, 115-143.
Dordrecht: Foris.