Determiners

This chapter introduces the reader to the intricate syntax and semantics of determiners highlighting common properties and dimensions of variation across Romance languages, with particular attention to Ibero-Romance (Catalan, Brazilian and European Portuguese, and Spanish), French, Italian, and Romanian and some of their regional dialects. It focuses on definite and indefinite articles, including null articles in so-called ‘bare’ nouns, as well as demonstratives and possessives. It claims that their grammatical status cannot be unified under a single category. It deals with the mandatory, optional, or impossible co-occurrence of these elements, the position they take with respect to one another and the other elements of the nominal expression, that is the noun, adjectival modifiers, and prepositional or genitival complements. It describes the major semantic ambiguity displayed by definite and indefinite articles. It presents the different positions and forms of demonstratives and possessives. In doing so, it provides language-specific diagnostics to distinguish strong, weak and clitic forms that are found across all types of determiners.