Indefinite Pronouns, Polarity, and Related Phenomena in Classical Armenian: A Study Based on the Old Armenian Gospels

Abstract

Classical Armenian possesses two series of indefinite pronouns, one in -k`, the other in -mn. The first is employed for the most part in contexts where English any appears, the second where English employs some. The distinction is therefore essentially one of polarity sensitivity, the forms in -k`being negative-polarity items (NPIs), those in -mn positive-polarity items (PPIs). As in English, the NPIs are employed also as generalizing or free-choice indefinites; but a host of other features, including minimal-value quantification, scalarity, and despecification are involved as well in the Classical Armenian -k`-forms.0. An interesting morphosyntactic feature of Classical Armenian is the presence of two separate indefinite animate pronouns, omn and ok`, 2 having the following paradigms: 3

Adversative Conjunction and Neighboring Discourse Features in Old Church Slavic (Codex Marianus), with Comparative Notes on the Same Phenomena in Greek, Gothic and Classical Armenian*

“…In both cases, the act in question is taken to be the very least that can be done to secure a result. That minimal‐value quantification may be a feature of polarity‐sensitive items has been documented in Klein (1997: 223–226), and therefore, taken together with the evidence of (58)–(61), the role of tŭk(ŭ)mo in signalling this value supports our overall characterization of this term as a polarity‐sensitive item. ,…”

Negation and Polarity in the Greek, Gothic, Classical Armenian, and Old Church Slavic Gospels

“…The relationship between these two is exactly like that of English any vs. some (cf. Klein 1997). Only Slavic, as we shall see, shows a pure negation ne in certain non-overtlynegative classical negative polarity contexts:…”

“…Recognizing the obvious advantages for comparative syntax presented by this material, I conceived in 1987 a project to analyze these texts for comparative syntactic purposes and have pursued it ever since with many interruptions. My contributions have so far involved only Gothic and Classical Armenian (Klein 1992a(Klein , 1992b(Klein , 1994(Klein , 1996(Klein , 1997Klein & Condon 1993). In addition, over the past twenty years a number of unpublished theses and dissertations have been produced under my direction at the [132] jared s. klein University of Georgia (in one instance elsewhere with me as co-director) as part of this project, mostly involving Gothic but with frequent inclusion of the Old English gospels (cf.…”

“…For an in-depth study of negative polarity in the Classical Armenian gospel text cf. Klein 1997. The corpus on which this analysis is based encompasses the Gospels of Matthew 1:1-11:25 and Mark, chapters 1-9 or just under 20% of the Gospel text in its entirety. For the Greek text, I have used the 26th edition of Nestle & Aland (1979), for Gothic the sixth edition of Streitberg's Gotische Bibel (1971), and for Old Church Slavic Jagič's edition of the 11th century Codex Marianus (1960) with occasional variant readings taken from his edition of the Codex Zographensis (late 10th/early 11th century) (1954).…”

Book Review: Indefinite Pronouns

“…It should be clear from the preceding discussion that I consider this book to be of great interest and value. Indeed, prior to its appearance, I had already made use of Haspelmath's dissertation in a recent study of indefinite pronouns in Classical Armenian (Klein 1997), a language not included in either of Haspelmath's samples. That I found the same factors to be relevant in classical Armenian as in Haspelmath's forty-language sample represents independent confirmation of the correctness of Haspelmath's assessments.…”