Festschrifts

Swedish is well known for the fact that it appears to show two reflexes of definiteness in its definite nominals. The language makes use of a definite article at the beginning of the nominal and a definite suffix on the head noun. There have been a number of approaches to dealing with the distribution of these elements. Some claim that there is but one determiner in the DP structure, but these do not permit an account of how semantic features influence the independent use of the article and the suffix. Other theories posit more functional material in the nominal, but these do not provide a satisfactory syntactic account for the distribution. The theory I develop here takes the most satisfying elements of each of these kinds of theories and unifies them to provide an approach that can account for the semantic facts and provide a more theoretically sound syntax.