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Three Perspectives on Swedish Indefinite Determiners

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2008

Joakim Nivre
Joakim Nivre
Affiliation:
School of Mathematics and Systems Engineering, Växjö University, SE-351 95 Växjö, Sweden. E-mail: Joakim.Nivre@msi.vxu.se
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Abstract

This article investigates the meaning and use of singular indefinite determiners in Swedish, in particular the way in which the existential determiner någon/något contrasts with the indefinite article en/ett in different contexts. The problem is approached from three different perspectives, the first being a contrastive Scandinavian perspective, where the Swedish data are reviewed in the light of contrastive data from the closely related languages Danish and Norwegian. Secondly, corpus data are used to substantiate the results of the contrastive analysis both quantitatively and qualitatively. The last section adopts a more theoretical perspective and tries to present a formal semantic analysis of the two determiners under study, drawing on typological work on indefinites and studies of the historical development of indefinite determiners.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , June 2002 , pp. 3 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2002

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