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(In)definiteness Spread in Semitic Construct State: Does it Really Exist?

Paper · 2017 · Mohammed Q. Shormani

Summary

The paper challenges a long-held assumption about the Semitic Construct State (CS): that the head noun inherits definiteness or indefiniteness from its genitive DP complement (GDC). This is a theoretical study. It uses no corpus or treebank and relies instead on Arabic and Hebrew examples, including Yemeni Arabic and Spanish Arabic data. Shormani first reviews the prosodic, head-movement and semantic accounts of "spread." He shows that each one faces counterexamples or rests on stipulations. He then argues that there are just two kinds of CS: definite ones, where the head itself carries al-/ha-, and indefinite ones, where it does not. The missing Arabic indefinite marker -n on the head is attributed to a phonological rule he calls VCR (Vowel Contextualization Rule), not to a missing feature. The specificity or uniqueness that some CS heads show is linked to possession, possibly through a Universal Grammar principle or parameter. This matters because it removes a construction-specific feature-percolation mechanism from the grammar.

Key points

  • The paper rests on three claims:
    • The literature is deeply divided on whether spread exists.
    • Arabic and Hebrew CS heads can take the definite article.
    • The absence of Arabic -n follows from the phonological rule VCR.
  • Earlier accounts infer spread from adjective agreement. In "bayt-u l-mudarris-i l-kabiir-u", the definite adjective is taken as proof that the bare head noun is definite.
  • Adjectives can come between the head and the GDC, which undermines the "one word" prosodic analysis:
    • Spanish Arabic: al-kās al-ṣagīr al-fiđđata (from Corriente 1997, discussed by Ouhalla 2009).
    • Yemeni Arabic: al-şahn l-kabiir l-zijaaj.
  • The paper cites four objections by Danon (2008) to Borer's (1999) incorporation analysis. Examples are the stipulated movement to Spec-NumP and the unmotivated Definiteness Criterion.
  • If the head really shared features with the GDC, other features such as Case and ϕ-features should spread too, but they do not.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The paper locates definiteness in overt marking on the head itself and treats uniqueness from possession as a separate, independent source of specificity.
  • I2. A missing affix is explained by a phonological rule rather than read as a negative feature value. Zero marking is not evidence that a feature is absent.
  • I3. A claimed adjacency/one-word property is tested by finding a single intervening modifier, which is a cheap and decisive falsification test.
  • I4. Selectivity serves as a sanity check: a mechanism that supposedly shares features should not share only one of them.
  • I5. Agreement on a modifier is treated as possibly misleading evidence about the head's own features.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (world): Entity records could hold "definite by article" and "unique by possession" as two separate flags, so referent resolution can explain which cue it used.
  • I2 (tokens): The morphology layer could label a missing marker as "suppressed by context" instead of assigning a feature value, which avoids false negative feature values.
  • I3 (learn): Self-induced repair rules that assume adjacency, such as possessor–head or compound rules, could be checked automatically against silver trees containing intervening adjectives as negative controls.
  • I4 (learn): Any learned agreement-propagation rule could be audited by checking whether it explains the full set of features it should transfer, and flagged if it covers only one.
  • I5 (tree): When converting UD dialects or treebanks, Definite features on amod dependents should not be copied onto the head noun without an overt marker on the head.

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

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 499 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semitic languages · 2,908 works

Cite

Cite as Mohammed Q. Shormani. 2017. (In)definiteness Spread in Semitic Construct State: Does it Really Exist?. Linguistik Online 80.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.13092/lo.80.3568

@inproceedings{shormani2017definiteness,
  title = {{(In)definiteness Spread in Semitic Construct State: Does it Really Exist?}},
  author = {Mohammed Q. Shormani},
  booktitle = {Linguistik Online 80},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.13092/lo.80.3568},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.13092/lo.80.3568}
}

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