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In:Weak Referentiality
Edited by Ana Aguilar-Guevara, Bert Le Bruyn and Joost Zwarts
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 219] 2014
► pp. 183–212

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Telic definites and their prepositions

French and Serbian

Published online: 3 December 2014
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.219.08asi
This papers accounts for the emergence of telic readings of potentially locative sentences in French and Serbian (corresponding to the English to go to the swimming pool ). The paper establishes that although deprived of overt marking of definiteness, the nominal of telic sentences of Serbian is interpreted as definite. It is shown that in both languages, telic definites are relational definites that take the human subject as the argument of the telic qualia associated to the head noun and that this option is restricted to under-specified spatial prepositions and verbs. A discussion of some very rare cases illustrating different telic constructions in both languages is proposed.
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