Cross-categorial definiteness/familiarity
Creators: name: Owusu, Augustina P.
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2022

description: This dissertation examines definiteness in Akan, focusing specifically on the so-called definite determiner nó, which occurs in both the nominal and clausal domains. I argue that nó encodes the presupposition of familiarity across categories—it requires the existence of a discourse referent with the descriptive content of its complement in the discourse. The complement of nó, as a cross-categorial determiner, includes NP and TP (as well as additional propositional nodes, including NegP). As such, the dissertation contributes to the growing body of research about cross-categorial definite determiners (Renans, 2016, 2018; Korsah, 2017), Ewe, and Fongbe (Lefebvre, 1998; Larson, 2003), as well as Haitian Creole (Lefebvre, 1998; Larson, 2003). Wespel, 2008) (Lefebvre, 1998; Wespel, 2008). Concentrating first on the nominal determiner, I demonstrate that nó imposes two conditions on its nominal complement: it must be familiar in the discourse and have a non-unique denotation in the larger discourse. These two requirements, encoded in the lexical entry for nó as presuppositions, capture two essential components of the determiner. The familiarity presupposition captures the fact that nó has anaphoric and immediate situation uses, as defined by Hawkins (1978). The term "familiarity" as used here corresponds to Roberts' (2003) notion of "weak familiarity." The second presupposition, non-uniqueness, which is borrowed from Robinson (2005) and Dayal and Jiang (2020), accounts for the incompatible of nó with inherently unique nouns such as president and superlatives. Moving to the clausal domain, I demonstrate that nó can be combined with declaratives where it takes a propositional argument. Thus, I argue that nó-clauses are definite propositions that have two semantic contributions: a presupposition of familiarity and an assertion. Additionally, it was demonstrated that, despite their status as definite propositions, nó-clauses in embedded context lack several of the characteristics associated with definite CPs in Hebrew (Kastner 2015) and Greek (Roussou 1991). For example, under non-factive predicates, nó-clauses do not elicit factive presuppositions. While clausal nó encodes familiarity, it cannot be used to reintroduce a proposition already present in the Common Ground. To account for this property, I adopt from Portner (2007) the idea that information is updated at two distinct levels during a conversation: the Common Propositional Space (CPS) and the Common Ground (CG). Each proposition uttered is stored in the CPS, while only asserted propositions are stored in the CG. Thus, prior to the utterance of a nó-clause, the information it encodes is contained only in the CPS. The nó-clause passes the information to the CG. As such, the study of clausal nó presented in this dissertation not only articulates the rather intriguing distributional properties of a clausal determiner, but also gives empirical evidence for a textured perspective of discourse structure. The dissertation further examines the semantic properties of the indefinite determiner, bí, with the goal of presenting a comprehensive view of the nominal space of Akan. Bí licenses exceptional wide-scope readings outside scope islands, transparent readings within the scope of intensional verbs, and referential use similar to specific indefinites, but also permits narrow-scope readings within islands and opaque readings within the scope of intensional verbs similar to non-specific indefinites. On the basis of these qualities, I propose that bí is an unambiguous choice function with an implicit skolemworld/situation variable. This analysis builds on Arkoh's (2011) analysis of bí in Akan. Bí is always skolemized to the situation of its argument, which means that both the choice function and the NP are always assessed relative to the same index. For the narrow-scope reading of bí, the situation pronoun may be bound locally in a conditional, and for the wide-scope reading, it may be bound by the matrix situation. Remarkably, the definite and indefinite determiners may occur in two distinct orders in a DP: NP bí nó, which is understood as definite, and NP nó bí, which is interpreted as partitive.