Investigating the semantics of articles and bare nouns.

Author : Carrie Gillon

Publication date : 2015

Bibliographical references :

Carrie Gillon. 2015. "Investigation D in Languages With and Without Articles". In M. Ryan Bochnak and Lisa Matthewson (eds). Methodologies in Semantic Fieldwork. Oxford University Press: New York. pp. 181-186.

Goals

This questionnaire aims to investigate the semantics of articles and bare nouns within a language.

Protocol summary

The author gives a list of empirical questions to be answered in order to investigate the semantics of a new article or a bare-noun. Following these 9 questions (4 for the articles and 5 regarding bare-nouns), a list of tests is provided to be able to answer these questions. "Each test can be applied to potential articles or to bare-nouns in languages that lack articles" (Gillon, 2015: 182)

1. Definiteness
2. Scope
3. Law of contradiction
4. Domain restriction

Development context

This questionnaire is included in Methodologies in Semantic Fieldwork, M. Ryan Bochnak and Lisa Matthewson (eds), 2015, Oxford University Press. Carrie Gillon has contributed to this work, publishing a chapter "Investigating D in languages with and without articles".

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