Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 05 March 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter uses Optimality Theory to develop a typology of number distinctions on the noun (singular/plural) and article use (definite/indefinite). The interaction between a small number of violable constraints leads to a classification of languages with a fairly wide empirical coverage. The addition of more constraints allows for extensions and subgroups.

Keywords: optimality theory, singular, plural, article, definite, indefinite

Henriëtte de Swart

Henriëtte de Swart is Professor of French Linguistics and Semantics at Utrecht University (the Netherlands). She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Groningen with a thesis entitled Adverbs of quantification: A generalized quantifier approach (1991). She works on topics in tense and aspect, negation, and indefinites. Her publications on tense and aspect include Meaning and use of not … until (Journal of Semantics, 1996), Aspect shift and coercion(NLLT, 1998), Aspectual implication of plural indefinites (2006), A cross-linguistic discourse analysis of the perfect (Journal of Pragmatics, 2007). She also wrote An introduction to natural language semantics (CSLI, 1998).

Joost Zwarts

Joost Zwarts teaches at the Department of Linguistics at Utrecht University. He previously worked as a researcher in the PIONIER project ‘Case Cross-linguistically’ at Radboud University Nijmegen. His main interests are in (formal and lexical) semantics and syntax, especially in the behaviour of prepositions and articles. He has done fieldwork in Kenya and published The Phonology of Endo (Lincom, 2004).

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.