doi: 10.18178/IJLLL.2025.11.4.594
Cross-Linguistic Exceptions to Definiteness Effects
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Ruijia Zhang *
- Department of Foreign Studies, North China Electric Power University, Baoding, China
- Manuscript received February 14, 2025
- accepted May 29, 2025
- published July 30, 2025
Abstract
This article reviews relevant syntactic studies on the Definiteness Effect phenomenon, and on this basis, puts forward some existing problems from a coss-linguistic perspective. The most influential analysis attributes DE to the semantic property of partitive Case, an inherent Case assigned to the indefinite NP. This partitive hypothesis also explains exceptions through parametric differences in Case licensing across languages like English, Italian, and French. However, there are still some exceptions, such as Chinese and Japanese, which demonstrate different DE manifestations compared to English and Italian. These cross-linguistic variations suggest that further research is required to comprehensively explain DE within the framework of partitive hypothesis.
Keywords
- definiteness effect
- unaccusative
- partitive case
- cross-linguistic variation
- existential sentences
How to Cite
Jiayao Tian, Huaxue Wang, Xueni Pan, and Ruijia Zhang, "Cross-Linguistic Exceptions to Definiteness Effects," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 171-175, 2025. https://doi.org/10.18178/IJLLL.2025.11.4.594
Copyright & License
Copyright © 2025 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).