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Tongan determiners and semantic composition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Randall Hendrick
Randall Hendrick*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
*
Department of Linguistics, Campus Box 3155, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3155 [hendrick@unc.edu]
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Abstract

This article describes the syntactic distribution and semantic interpretation of determiners in Tongan (Polynesian). This determiner system is unusual because it contains, in addition to the familiar definite and indefinite, a third contrasting morpheme, labeled ‘semi-definite’ in traditional descriptions. A description of the behavior of these three determiners is offered that makes use of some conceptual tools provided by recent crosslinguistic work in formal semantics.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 81 , Issue 4 , December 2005 , pp. 907 - 926
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by the Linguistic Society of America

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