Volume 23, Spring 2001
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Browsing Volume 23, Spring 2001 by Subject "Definiteness"
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Item Open Access Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 23, Spring 2001(University of Calgary, 2001-05) Dobrovolsky, Michael; Mezhevich, Ilana; Sheedy, Cory; Thormoset, David; Thrift, EricaThe editors of this volume, Cory Sheedy, Ilana Mezhevich, Erica Thrift, David Thormoset, and Michael Dobrovolsky are pleased to present the twenty-third issue of the Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics published by the department of linguistics at the University of Calgary. The papers contained in this volume represent works in progress and as such should not be considered in any way final or definitive.Item Open Access Locative insertion, definiteness, and free word order in Russian(University of Calgary, 2001-05) Mezhevich, IlanaIn this paper, I examine Russian data in terms of definiteness versus indefiniteness and locative inversion. The latter is investigated in Bresnan (1994). She presents an analysis of locative inversion in English and Chichewa and discusses the restrictions on locative inversion in these languages. In particular, she shows that, in English, locative inversion is permitted with many intransitive verbs and passivized transitive verbs (taking into account the by-phrase restriction), but is disallowed with transitive verbs. This generalization applies to Russian verbs as well. The notion of definiteness, however, requires clarification. As a starting point I adopt the definition proposed by Kramsky (1972:30): "By the term "determinedness" we understand the fact that nouns are classified according to whether the content expressed by the noun is clear and identifiable in a concrete way or not". This definition is vague and, therefore not very helpful. In the course of this paper, I will attempt to achieve a more precise formulation of definiteness.