Abstract:
In linguistics, „indefiniteness“ was studied in opposition to definiteness. This usually reduced to describing morphological exponents, first of all in the so-called article languages. In Poland, the quantificational model for the description of the definiteness/indefiniteness category is not sufficiently known, though in the world it is just scope-based logical quantification that is recognized as a suitable theoretical model for describing this language category. In article-free languages, lexical counterparts corresponding to the contents of articles were searched for. As a result of the above, the definiteness/indefiniteness category was treated solely as a nominal phrase category. Our studies have shown that the definiteness/indefiniteness category is expressed with diverse language means: lexical and morphological ones, and also on the level of the verbal phrase rather than only on that of the nominal phrase, as considered up to now in the literature on that subject; and that the discussed category is a category of the sentence rather than of the nominal phrase. In our works, the definiteness/indefiniteness category was defined as a category with the semantic opposition: uniqueness/non-uniqueness, whereby definiteness is understood solely as the uniqueness of an element or a set (satisfying the predicate), and by indefiniteness - non-uniqueness (including both existentiality and universality). Quantification also applies to the meanings of temporal and aspectual forms. The use of the term „definiteness“ in the cases when the so-called „definite article“ expresses indefiniteness, i.e. universality, is an obvious error, and follows from the failure to distinguish between the form and its meaning.
