Translation Mining: Definiteness across Languages (A Reply to Jenks 2018)
Publication date
2022-09-01
Authors
Bremmers, David
Liu, Jianan
van der Klis, Martijn
Le Bruyn, Bert
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Supervisors
Document Type
Article
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taverne
Abstract
We present a parallel corpus study that compares the distribution of German contracted/ uncontracted articles and Mandarin bare nouns/ demonstratives. Work by Schwarz (2009) and Jenks (2018) leads us to predict that German contracted articles pattern with Mandarin bare nouns and German uncontracted articles with Mandarin demonstra-tives. We show that these predictions are only partly borne out and argue for a more fine-grained typology of definiteness.
Keywords
German, Mandarin, definiteness, semantics, strong/ weak distinction, Taverne, Language and Linguistics, Linguistics and Language
Citation
Bremmers, D, Liu, J, van der Klis, M & Le Bruyn, B 2022, 'Translation Mining : Definiteness across Languages (A Reply to Jenks 2018)', Linguistic Inquiry, vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 735-752. https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00423