Specificity as an Effect of Inflection and Structure

A large number of different grammatical phenomena have been described in diverse languages which appear to correlate with the "specificity" of indefinite (and sometimes definite) DPs. However, the semantic descriptions of these specificity-effects are often so disparate and unsystematic that it is impossible to determine whether they indeed involve one and the same semantic "specificity" phenomenon, which is syntactically encoded differently in different languages. To a lesser degree, this also holds of the syntactic correlates: whether the specificity-marking in one language is indeed of the same type as the specificity-marking in another language often remains unclear.

The project investigates the cross-linguistic (semantic) underpinnings of the supposed correlation between specificity, and rich agreement/case marking and word order. For instance, in Hindi, there is agreement only with specific object-DPs. In Turkish, accusative case appears on the object only when it is definite (specific? strong?). In addition, specificity / definiteness appears to correlate with word order variation effects: in general, definite (specific? strong?) DPs show greater word order variation than indefinite DPs (allowing for scrambling, VP-external subjects, dative alternations). The double correlation is illustrated directly in Persian, where the object is overtly marked with râ only if it is both specific, and outside the government domain of V.

Despite the existence of a considerable body of previous research, both generative and typological, however, the nature of these correlations is still largely obscure. The project addresses the question whether the DP types involved indeed form a natural class and if so, how they should be semantically characterized. In particular, in many descriptions in the literature it is unclear on what intuition the classification of an NP as "specific" and "non-specific" is based. What is needed is the development of a uniform suite of tests for specificity and related notions, so that the effects of various specificity-markers may be compared. Hence, a practical aim of this project is to construct standardized tests for detecting and diagnosing semantic specificity-effects, in order to facilitate a meaningful catalogue of such effects in various languages.

There is a strong suspicion that natural languages do make use of a universal semantic notion of specificity, and choose from a restricted set of syntactic strategies to encode the specificity of a DP. The aim of this project is to provide a systematic description of specificity effects in a fairly large (preferably areally and genetically balanced) set of languages, which either figure in the specificity literature, or are otherwise known to have properties relevant to specificity marking. In this way, we hope to answer the following question:

Does natural language really employ a universal semantic notion of "specificity"?

Besides developing or refining a semantic theory of specificity in natural language, the project is aimed at building a reusable database of semantically, syntactically and morphologically annotated data from a variety of languages.