On Definiteness and Specificity in Turkish and Persian*

The purpose of this paper is to examine the languages Turkish and Persian, which encode specificity morphologically, in order to establish that definiteness entails specificity in natural languages, rather than the two distinctions being cross-cutting categories as has been suggested by some researchers. We also provide evidence from both languages, which lack definite articles but have definite interpretations of nominal phrases in certain syntactic positions, that definiteness in a universal sense does not entail familiarity. We further show that Persian has a suffix that marks familiarity morphologically. After introducing the specificity issue in §1, we review the Givenness Hierarchy of Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski 1993 in §2, and demonstrate how it predicts that all definites are specific and that definites do not need to be familiar. In §3, we introduce specificity marking in Turkish and Persian, and show that definites in object position are always marked specific. In §4, we show that Persian has a familiarity marker, and illustrate how definites do not need to be familiar in Turkish and Persian and that examples of unfamiliar definite article phrases in English are translated into Persian without the familiarity marker. In §5, we discuss two puzzles involving apparent restrictions on specificity marking in Persian and Turkish. In §6, we briefly conclude