indefinite and definite articles

[zaba]

So let's say a language has no definite articles. It just uses e.g. 'one' to mark the indefinite (meaning 'some' like in Spanish 'unos caballeros').

How can such languages mark the definite?  Does every language with an indefinite have some way to mark the definite?

[MalFet]

There are literally infinite ways that a language *could* mark the definite, ranging from lexical to morphosyntactic to prosodic to pragmatic. The sky's the limit.

But, the definite counterpart to the use of a lexical number "one" to indicate indefiniteness (which is fairly common cross linguistically) would probably be the use of a deictic determiner like "this" or "that".

[mallu]

There are many Indic languages that lack definite articles.Indefiniteness may sometimes be marked by adjectival form of 'one'. Definiteness is not marked generally.But is definiteness  an independent  property of an expression to be marked always ?   Though distributionally it differs from adjective , Are they not  a kind of adjective?

[Daniel]

You are making a(n incorrect) assumption that "definiteness" is a universal category that is encoded consistently.

The definite article, even in languages with one, can vary significantly in its use! So while a Chinese or Russian learner of English has a lot of trouble with articles, a Spanish learner of English will also have a lot of trouble with certain uses of articles because they aren't like in Spanish.


As MalFet said, very roughly, a general equivalent to English "a" is 'one' and a general equivalent to English "the" is 'this' or 'that', but in fact these aren't really even encoding definiteness strictly. 'one' implies non-uniqueness, while 'this' or 'that' is a deictic word, pointing to a shared concept (similar to definiteness but only part of the puzzle).

If you want to understand definiteness, you should do some reading and consider specificity vs. uniqueness, among other things.


Regardless, many languages simply do not encode this information regularly in the grammar. So you should not assume you will find either or both, but you might!

I have seen that some Dravidian languages do seem to have indefinite articles but not definite articles, while Arabic only has definite articles [with a particular very formal ending used for indefiniteness only in the most formal use of formal Arabic, not in the spoken varieties].