caa a22 4500 378908464 CHVBK 20180305123535.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161128e20040913xx s 000 0 eng 10.1515/ling.2004.42.6.1129 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)gruyter-10.1515/ling.2004.42.6.1129 Chen Ping 1. University of Queensland. Identifiability and definiteness in Chinese [Elektronische Daten] [Ping Chen] This article explores how the pragmatic notion of identifiability is encoded in Chinese. It presents a detailed analysis of the distinctive linguistic devices, including lexical, morphological, and position in sentence, which are employed in Chinese to indicate the interpretation of referents in respect of identifiability. Of the major determiners in Chinese, demonstratives are developing uses of a definite article, and yi ‘one' + classifier has developed uses of an indefinite article, although morphologically and in some cases also functionally they have not yet been fully grammaticalized. What makes Chinese further different from languages like English is the interpretation in this regard of what are called indeterminate lexical encodings, which include bare NPs and cardinality expressions. They by themselves are neutral in respect of the interpretation of identifiability. For indeterminate expressions, there is a strong but seldom absolute correlation between the interpretation of identifiability or nonidentifiability and their occurrence in different positions in a sentence. Unlike the cases with several other languages without articles like Czech, Hindi, and Indonesian, the features of definiteness and indefiniteness cannot be obligatorily and uniquely specified for nominal expressions in Chinese. The findings in this article lead to the conclusion that definiteness as a grammatical category defined in the narrow sense has not been fully developed in Chinese. © Walter de Gruyter Psycholinguistics nationallicence Grammar, syntax, linguistic structure nationallicence Phonetics, phonology, prosody nationallicence Linguistics Walter de Gruyter 42/6(2004-09-13), 1129-1184 0024-3949 42:6<1129 2004 42 ling https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.2004.42.6.1129 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.2004.42.6.1129 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Chen Ping 1. University of Queensland NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Linguistics Walter de Gruyter 42/6(2004-09-13), 1129-1184 0024-3949 42:6<1129 2004 42 ling CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-gruyter