Abstrakt
We provide novel corpus evidence that the definiteness of a bare (nondetermined) noun phrase (NP) depends on the position of the NP in the clause, thus corroborating an intuition common among Slavic linguists since the 1970s. The most significant finding is that indefinite bare NPs are very unlikely to occur in clause-initial position.
A further notable result is that definiteness of a bare NP is affected by its absolute position in the clause (clause-initial vs. clause-final), but not its position relative to the verb (preverbal vs. postverbal). This has worrisome implications for theories according to which the verb partitions the clause into a presupposed and nonpresupposed area.
Finally, we are able to tease apart the effect of clausal position from the effect of syntactic function, to the effect that being a subject or object (properties that strongly correlate with being clause-initial and clause-final, respectively) does not increase the likelihood of bare NPs to be interpreted as definite or indefinite, respectively.