Many languages use definite and indefinite articles to signal the referential status of individuals in conversational space. But articles are not necessary to set up or maintain discourse reference, as witnessed by the fact that languages can also get by with bare nominals. Similarly, we find that many, but not all languages use a morphological singular/plural contrast to distinguish reference ...

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify brain regions involved in the process of mapping coherent discourse onto a developing mental representation. We manipulated discourse coherence by presenting sentences with definite articles (which lead to more coherent discourse) or indefinite articles (which lead to less coherent discourse). Comprehending connected discourse, co...

The aim of this paper is to show that Uzbek has the crosslinguistically rather unusual property of using two indefinite articles, namely the expressions bir and bitta. From a synchronic perspective the two indefinite articles can be shown to compete (at least in certain environments), and from a diachronic perspective there is evidence that bitta significantly expands to the expense of bir. The...

There is a well known tradition in the literature on definite Determiner Phrases (DPs) that concentrates on the asymmetries in the distribution and the anaphoric properties of determiners such as articles and demonstratives. A huge amount of work on the topic has been done on French by linguists like Kleiber, Corblin, Marandin, Maes, Apothéloz, Reichler-Béguelin or De Mulder, and on English by ...

Definiteness is visibly expressed by definite articles in English, but some languages such as Korean lack this morphological exponent. However, speakers of such languages still mark definiteness in different ways. In this proposal, we lay out a study that examines the (re)assembly required by L1-English L2-Korean learners where the formal feature of definiteness in the L1 has to be readjusted t...

The prototypes of definiteness and indefiniteness in English are the definite article the and the indefinite article a/an, and singular noun phrases (NPs) determined by them. That being the case it is not to be predicted that the concepts, whatever their content, will extend satisfactorily to other determiners or NP types. However it has become standard to extend these notions. Of the two categ...

Symbolic integration deals with the evaluation of integrals in closed form. We present an overview of Risch’s algorithm including recent developments. The algorithms discussed are suited for both indefinite and definite integration. They can also be used to compute linear relations among integrals and to find identities for special functions given by parameter integrals. The aim of this present...