earticle

영어

The purpose of this paper is to show the difference in the grammatical encoding of the cross-categorial semantic distinction ‘bounded/unbounded’, a distinction that concerns the dimension of quantity of objects and events. Czech encodes it on the verb with V0-modifiers, whereas Finnish in the NP with case suffixes. In Finnish, the accusative/partitive case alternation that expresses the ‘bounded/unbounded’ distinction in the domain of individuals is systematically exploited to indicate the aspectual distinction, a distinction in the domain of events. In Czech, the encoding system of V0-modifiers that expresses the ‘bounded/unbounded’ distinction in the domain of events is exploited for conveying certain meanings that are related to those of articles within NPs in such languages as English, for example. Czech and Finnish clearly differ in the language-specific schematizations that are associated with their respective linguistic representations. However, the interaction between verbal and nominal predicates in Finnish and Czech is based on the same general principles that can be best accounted for within the lattice-theoretic analysis.