Fine-tuning (in)definiteness in the absence of articles: Experimental investigation of Russian

Abstract

Languages vary in the ways they encode (in)definiteness. In languages with articles, determiners like the and a/an in English explicitly mark whether a nominal is definite or indefinite. By contrast, in languages without articles, nouns can appear bare, with no special (in)definiteness marking. This raises a fundamental question: in the absence of articles, do bare nouns have a uniform semantic profile, and if so, is it definite-like, indefinite-like, or something else? Is this semantic profile the same in systems where bare nouns co-exist with overtly (in)definite nouns, like English, vs. in systems that have no articles whatsoever? This dissertation aims to answer these questions, focusing primarily on Russian, and using English as a comparison. Through a series of controlled experimental studies, I investigate (in)definiteness across the following dimensions: uniqueness, maximality and anaphoricity. The results bear on competing approaches to nominal semantics: the neo-Carlsonian approach (Carlson 1989; Chierchia 1998; Dayal 2004, 2013), which derives bare noun meanings from kind reference and iota; existential-based approaches, which treat bare nouns as fundamentally indefinite; and property-based approaches, which allow free alternation between definite and indefinite construals. Across the board, the findings rule out a fully existential-based analysis of bare nouns. Russian bare singulars display systematic sensitivity to uniqueness, and apparent violations reflect contextual domain restriction rather than existential semantics. Both Russian and English bare plurals tend to be interpreted maximally, which is again inconsistent with a purely existential analysis. Russian bare plurals show robust anaphoric potential that English bare plurals lack, consistent with the prediction that covert iota is available in Russian but blocked in English by the overt definite article. However, this anaphoric potential is strongly modulated by discourse context, suggesting that iota is accessible rather than obligatory. More broadly, the cross-linguistic contrast supports a gradient rather than categorical version of the Blocking Principle (Chierchia 1998). Taken together, this dissertation provides controlled experimental evidence bearing on a long-standing debate in formal semantics that has largely relied on introspective judgments and corpus data, with only a few experimental investigations to date. I argue that Russian bare nouns should not be analyzed as standard existential quantifiers, as they consistently display properties associated with definiteness. However, they are also not simply covert definites. Like overt definites in languages with articles, they require uniqueness/maximality; but unlike overt definites, they are exempt from the Novelty-Familiarity condition (Heim 1982), in line with the position outlined in Dayal (2026). This exemption follows from the absence of overt (in)definiteness morphology rather than from an ambiguity in the underlying semantic operation. The findings point towards an analysis in which bare nouns in articleless languages are realized through an iota-like operator or kind formation, but not through a standard existential operator or a choice function.