Abstract
Maltese noun phrases exhibit ‘definiteness agreement’ between head noun and modifier. However, the status of this phenomenon as a case of true morphosyntactic agreement has been disputed, given its apparent optionality. The present paper presents a corpus-based study of the distribution of adjectives with and without definite marking, and then tests the pragmatic licensing claim through a production study. Speakers were found to be more likely to use definite adjectives in referential noun phrases when the adjectives had a specifically contrastive function. This result is discussed in the context of both theoretical and psycholinguistic work on the pragmatics of referentiality.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Manfred Krug and Christopher Lucas for discussion and insights at the Bamberg workshop and after. Comments by Christopher Lucas and Ray Fabri on earlier drafts contributed towards fleshing out many of the ideas presented here. The author gratefully acknowledges the constructive comments of an anonymous reviewer.
Abbreviations
- def
definite
- freq
frequency
- fsg
feminine singular
- msg
masculine singular
- neg
negation
- NP
noun phrase
- prop
proportion
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