Definiteness without determiners in German

Abstract

The paper investigates conditions for the bare occurrence of noun phrases in the topic position of specificational copula clauses in German. It is shown that this is a predicate position for non-referential NPs. Specificational clauses in German are special because of the unusual alignment of the predicative position with the topic position. I show that the condition for the bare occurrence of NPs in this position is that the head noun denotes a functional concept. According to the theory of concept types by Löbner (2011), nouns denoting functional concepts are relational and unique. I argue that relationality ensures the anchoring of bare NPs in the discourse via an anaphoric link to a bridging antecedent in the previous discourse and qualifies them to be a topic in the sense of discourse-familiarity. The uniqueness of such NPs is the key to understanding why they can occur bare without a definite article: they belong to the type of definite descriptions in which definiteness is based on uniqueness. The article in uniqueness- based DPs encodes uniqueness and indicates morphological case. Since NPs denoting functional concepts are already unique, and as complements of the copula are not assigned case, the article need not be realized.