Krug, Manfred and Lucas, Christopher (2018) 'Definite article (omission) in British, Maltese, and other Englishes.' STUF - Language Typology and Universals - Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung, 71 (2). pp. 261-301.
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Abstract
This article investigates factors that underlie the discrepancies in article omission between Maltese English (MaltE) and British English (BrE), with reference to further ENL, ESL and EFL varieties. We investigate seasons of the year, ordinal numbers, languages, proper nouns, titles, institutions and common nouns. Our sources include text corpora, and web and questionnaire-based data. Our key proposal is that MaltE has innovated a rule that the definite article may be omitted when the uniqueness or identifiability of a referent is salient in context. Furthermore, MaltE avoids the definite article commonly when the referent is generic rather than definite. The resulting MaltE system is regulated according to fewer parameters than in BrE, but more consistently.
| Item Type: | Journal Article |
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| Keywords: | Maltese English; British National Corpus (BNC); International Corpus of English (ICE); article omission; zero article |
| SOAS Departments & Centres: | Departments and Subunits > School of Languages, Cultures & Linguistics > Department of Linguistics |
| ISSN: | 21967148 |
| Copyright Statement: | © 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. This is the published version of record. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| DOI (Digital Object Identifier): | https://doi.org/10.1515/stuf-2018-0012 |
| Date Deposited: | 22 Oct 2017 14:55 |
| URI: | https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/24725 |
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