Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

Macedonian seems to have three definite articles (Tomic, 2012; Minova-Gjurkova, 1994; Koneski, 2004).

1. Kucheto    si             igra.

   Dog+the   refl.CL    playing
   ‘The only dog in the current situation is playing.’

2. Kucheno             si            igra.
   Dog+the.distal   refl.CL   playing
   ‘The dog distant from us in the current situation is playing.’

3. Kuchevo                   si            igra.
   Dog+the.proximal   refl.CL   playing
   ‘The dog close to me in the current situation is playing.'

While this paradigm has been documented in the literature, the full extent of how similar and how different the three definite articles are semantically has not been accomplished. In this talk, we attempt to fill this gap. In doing so, we follow Schwarz's (2009, 2013) general theoretical proposal that uniqueness and familiarity are necessary to explain the semantic behavior of definite articles. On the basis of various data that we will present, we argue that the t-root article in Macedonian lexicalizes iota and satisfies strong and weak familiarity, while the v and n-root articles satisfy weak familiarity. We will additionally present data that illustrates that the three articles are not equivalent to their corresponding demonstratives, from which they historically evolved, as the latter have different presuppositions for their use to be felicitous (Minova-Gjurkova, 1994; Karapejovski, 2017, 2020).