Determiner Spreading¶
An extra determiner or determiner-like marker accompanies an adnominal modifier within one interpreted nominal expression.
Core Idea¶
Determiner spreading adds a determiner or determiner-like marker alongside a modifier within one interpreted nominal expression. Greek articles and Rukiga modifier augments realize this pattern differently: the extra marker does not introduce a second independent referent, and one integrated nominal can denote plural flowers.[ref-420213fd3651][ref-60b3975e7ba8] The family does not require literal copying, an overt article on the head, one syntactic DP, or a shared derivation; close-apposition and reduced-relative accounts remain the authors’ proposals.[ref-420213fd3651][ref-60b3975e7ba8]
Scope of Application¶
The scope is language-specific nominal construction analysis, with two documented language settings:
- Greek polydefinites — i asimenia i pena means the silver pen, with articles accompanying adjective and noun.[^ref-420213fd3651]
- Greek order contrasts — i pena i asimenia is licensed; single-article i pena asimenia is starred.[^ref-420213fd3651]
- Rukiga augmented adjectives — e-bi-muri é-bi-rúngi has modifier augment é- plus class prefix bi-.[^ref-60b3975e7ba8]
- Rukiga unaugmented contrast — e-bi-muri bi-rúngi retains concord; augment optionality belongs to this order.[^ref-60b3975e7ba8]
These contrasts do not constitute four independent studies; Albanian and Swedish remain unadjudicated.
Clarity¶
Count pronounced markers, interpreted nominal referents and morphological functions separately: Rukiga bi- concord remains without extra é-, while repeated Greek articles need not introduce separate pens.[ref-420213fd3651][ref-60b3975e7ba8] Meaning also needs context: the ordinary examples support restriction, but Greek special or frozen nonrestrictive uses and Rukiga indefinite environments prevent treating extra marking as universal restriction, definiteness or exclusion of every alternative.[ref-420213fd3651][ref-60b3975e7ba8]
Manages Complexity¶
Track five roles: unified nominal interpretation, head nominal anchor, adnominal modifier, extra modifier-associated exponent, and local licensing and interpretation. This organizes articles, augments, concord, orders and readings without equating their forms or analyses: the Greek adjective and noun concern one silver-pen nominal, while the Rukiga augment accompanies the adjective within one plural flower nominal.[ref-420213fd3651][ref-60b3975e7ba8]
Abstract Reasoning¶
Use contrast checking, role mapping and boundary testing to separate ordinary modification from additional marking. Greek permits single-article i asimenia pena but stars its postnominal counterpart; Rukiga keeps class concord when the flower example’s augment is absent, so removing a marker cannot be assumed harmless across orders.[ref-420213fd3651][ref-60b3975e7ba8] Check interpretation and local licensing together rather than inferring a construction from repeated syllables, a translation with the, or a restrictive meaning alone.
Knowledge Transfer¶
The five-role comparison transfers literally between Greek and Rukiga after distinguishing article from augment, concord from additional marking, and each language’s licensed orders.[ref-420213fd3651][ref-60b3975e7ba8] Referent names a related interpretation target, while Agreement concerns feature correspondence; neither explains the modifier-associated extra exponent that defines this construction. Repeated labels or words outside nominal grammar require separate evidence: two linguistic realizations do not establish a nonlinguistic whole, and literal copying or a universal common derivation cannot be inferred from the name spreading.
Neighborhood in Abstraction Space¶
Determiner Spreading sits in a sparse region of the domain-specific corpus (63rd percentile for distinctiveness): few abstractions share its structure, so a faithful description tends to retrieve it precisely.
Family — Language, Mind & Meaning-Making (62 abstractions)
Nearest neighbors
- Hendiadys — 0.87
- Dative Case — 0.84
- Adjunct (Grammar) — 0.84
- Bare Nouns — 0.84
- Cross-Serial Dependencies — 0.83
Computed from structural-signature embeddings · 2026-10-17
References¶
[^ref-420213fd3651]: Marika Lekakou and Kriszta Szendrői, "Polydefinites in Greek: Ellipsis, close apposition and expletive determiners" (2012), Journal of Linguistics 48(1):107–149. DOI: 10.1017/S0022226711000326. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1358392/1/download10.pdf. Describes the construction in the abstract on printed p. 107 and §1 on pp. 108–109: silver-pen examples (1a–b), single-article contrast (3a–b), and p. 109 note 4 on special/frozen nonrestrictive uses. The close-apposition, ellipsis and determiner accounts are the authors' proposals, reported in the abstract and introduction rather than established here as a universal mechanism. The complete 44-page publisher-layout PDF was remotely text-accessible; its first page is a cover, so printed p. 107 is one-based PDF p. 2. New local retrieval returned 403 and page-image retrieval failed; no local byte hash, visual diacritic audit or full theoretical rederivation is claimed. First published online 19 December 2011, distinct from the 2012 issue year.
[^ref-60b3975e7ba8]: Asiimwe, Allen; Kouneli, Maria; van der Wal, Jenneke. (2023). "Determiner spreading in Rukiga". Linguistics 61(5):1285–1339. DOI: 10.1515/ling-2021-0027. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11585904/. Describes the flower example in §1(1a), the separately attributed Greek red-bike comparison in §1(2) and §4.1.4(45), the indefinite and picture/production contrasts in §3.1(11–13), modifier distribution in Table 1, descriptive terminology before §4.1, ordering in §4.1.2, and nonexclusive alternatives in §5(88–91). The full original open HTML article was inspected at these selected locators; no new local PDF, raw speaker data, independent elicitation or figure-image analysis is claimed. D-associated augment and reduced-relative structure are author analyses. The introductory flower string was not the stimulus in the separate pineapple and vehicle tasks.