Although typologists have described the Russian and Korean languages as not having definite articles (Dryer 2013), research indicates that speakers of both of these languages may use demonstratives in discourse to signal definiteness (Kang 2015; Grenoble 1998), in contrast to exophoric usage. In Russian speakers, this phenomenon has been noted with the demonstratives tot (distal) and etot (proximal), and for Korean speakers it has been observed with the distal demonstrative ku. The research presented here involved collecting narrative data from 5 L1 Russian speakers and 10 L1 Korean speakers through an experimental task. Speakers watched an initial film clip (Modern Times, Chaplin, 1933) with a researcher who was an L1 speaker of their language. The researcher then left the room, and the speaker watched a later clip from the same film. When the researcher returned, the speaker described the second clip in the target language. The purpose of this research was to investigate the contexts statistically associated with the production of definite-marking demonstratives in each language, to research the cross-linguistic significance of features that have been suggested by some researchers to be associated with definiteness universally or at least in a crosslinguistically recurrent pattern (e.g., Gundel et al, 1993), and to identify contexts that motivate the use of definite marking that might contribute crosslinguistically to higher communicative efficiency. 

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The results of a series of binomial logistic regressions revealed that although the significance of some predictor variables such as topicality and speaker uniqueness was language specific, disambiguation, recent reference, and production at a paragraph boundary all significantly correlated with a change in likelihood of production of anaphoric demonstratives for speakers of both languages. If the demonstratives produced by the speakers in these experiments can be considered non-grammaticalized definite markers, these results suggest that some features such as hearer identifiability that were associated with definiteness in earlier models may be more culture-specific than previously suggested and that only a limited number of features associated with definiteness are potentially universal. It also suggests that what may be most efficient crosslinguistically is a definite marker’s function as disambiguater and updater of referents in discourse. The results of this experiment also showed a remarkably large number of anaphoric demonstrative tokens produced by Korean speakers, raising the question of whether this is a long-term stable language feature or if ku might be in the beginning stages of a transition toward definite article status.

 

Chaplin, C., Goddard, P., Bergman, H., & Conklin, C. (1933). Modern Times. United Artists.

Dryer, Matthew S. (2013) Definite Articles. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin

(eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for

Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/37, Accessed on

2017-11-14.) 

 

Gundel, J. K., Hedberg, N., & Zacharski, R. (1993). Cognitive status and the form of referring

expressions in discourse. Language, 274-307.