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Revisiting definiteness: Insights from two types of definite articles in Tihami Arabic

Paper · 2025 · Amer Asiri and John Gluckman

Summary

Recent work on languages with two definite articles usually splits them into a "weak" article for uniqueness and a "strong" article that adds anaphoric familiarity (Schwarz, Jenks). Asiri and Gluckman test this split on Tihami Arabic, a dialect of the southern Red Sea coast with two articles, im- and al-. No Tihami corpora exist, so the data come from native-speaker judgments (the first author, family and friends) checked against published dialect descriptions. The weak/strong model fails here: both articles occur in anaphoric contexts, and which one appears depends on the noun. Instead, the authors adopt Löbner's distinction between nouns that are unique by their meaning and nouns that become unique only through context. al- marks the first group and im- the second. They formalize this with Šimík's (2021) situation semantics:

  • an im- noun phrase is interpreted against the current topic situation alone;
  • an al- noun phrase is interpreted against every situation similar to the topic situation.

The analysis also handles nouns that shift between the two classes. The result broadens the cross-linguistic typology of definiteness.

Key points

  • Tihami is spoken by roughly 5,344,000 people in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. al- is shared with other Arabic varieties, but im- is a hallmark of this dialect.
  • The two articles behave differently in sound: al- assimilates to a following coronal consonant, while im- does not.
  • After "a mother and a boy" are introduced, a later mention of the boy needs im- and a later mention of the mother needs al-. Anaphora therefore does not decide the article.
  • In Schwarz's model the strong article contains the weak one. The authors find no such containment between inherent and non-inherent uniqueness, so they do not build one meaning from the other.
  • Near demonstratives, the article depends on word order: a noun after the demonstrative takes al-, and a noun before it takes im-. Reunion Creole (three-way split) and Haitian Creole are cited as other languages that fall outside the weak/strong model.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Nouns can carry a lexical feature for whether they pick out a unique referent by themselves (relational or functional nouns like "mother", individual nouns like "sky") or only through context (sortal nouns like "boy").
  • I2. Uniqueness is checked against a scope: either the single current topic situation or the whole class of similar situations.
  • I3. Class membership is a default that context can override, so an inherently unique noun can act contextually and the reverse.
  • I4. The non-inherent definite may be read as a scalar "some but not all" counterpart of the inherent one, which the authors leave as future work.
  • I5. The argument rests on minimal pairs in which one article is grammatical and the other is starred, in the same discourse.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): coreference could use this feature to decide when "the X" must find an antecedent or a situational referent, and when it can safely introduce a new, inherently unique entity.
  • I2 (world): entity lookup in the text world could record which scope licensed a definite, separating "the dog in this story" from "the sun", which holds across all comparable worlds.
  • I3 (world): the WordNet/FrameNet-derived noun classes should be stored as defeasible defaults, with shift rules triggered by modifiers or by a preceding discourse.
  • I4 (frames): the implicature module could treat the choice of a context-bound definite as signalling that the referent is not unique across situations.
  • I5 (learn): definiteness and coreference evaluation could include paired negative controls where only the noun class changes, to check that the system relies on lexical class rather than on surface anaphora cues.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of KansasLawrence · United States4 works · 29 citations🎓Majmaah UniversityRiyadh · Saudi Arabia2 works · 5 citations

📚 Shelves 4 Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Language and Linguistics · 9,206 works Psychology · 798 works Experimental and Cognitive Psychology · 463 works

🧭 Topics 1 Semitic languages · 1,484 works

Cite

Cite as Amer Asiri and John Gluckman. 2025. Revisiting definiteness: Insights from two types of definite articles in Tihami Arabic. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.18227

@article{asiri2025revisiting,
  title = {{Revisiting definiteness: Insights from two types of definite articles in Tihami Arabic}},
  author = {Amer Asiri and John Gluckman},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.18227},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.18227}
}

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