To Be or Not to Be a Determiner
To Be or Not to Be a Determiner
This chapter focuses on lauter, a determiner in German which carries peculiar properties. A survey of older uses of lauter in the sense of ‘pure’, ‘unpolluted’, but also ‘mere’, offers a starting point for an analysis of synchronic lauter that does justice to the grammatical differences between the item and other, apparently near-synonym determiners like einige (some) or viele (many). It is argued that the word has retained its older adjectival character, presumably in order to avoid violation of the Keenan/Stavy universal for determiners. This case, hence, corroborates hypotheses in typological work on determiners.
Keywords: scales, merely, purely, Keenan/Stavy hypothesis, adjectives, typology
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