Definite: definiteness or state
Definiteness in Slovenian is an inflectional feature of masculine word forms in nominative and accusative singular that distinguishes whether we are talking about something known and concrete, or something general or unknown. It is currently marked on some adjectives and some determiners.
Ind: indefinite
Examples
- rdeč avto “a red car”
- dvojen umor “a double homicide”
- drug način “another way”
- sosedov sin “neighbour’s son”
Def: definite
Examples
- rdeči avto “the red car”
- dvojni umor “the double homicide”
- drugi način “the other way”
- slovenski grb “the Slovenian coat-of-arms”
Conversion from JOS
All adjectives and numerals with feature Definiteness=yes are converted to Definite=Def and all adjectives and numerals with feature Definiteness=no are converted to Definite=Ind.
However, note that definiteness has not been sufficiently solved within JOS, as it could also be attributed to other POS categories or category types, such as ordinal written numerals (prvi, drugi, tretji) and pronouns (neki). Consequently, some inconsistencies occur, as different JOS categories are merged into one UD category. For example, JOS-adjective slovenski “Slovenian” has feature Definite=Def, whereas JOS-numeral prvi “the first” does not have any Definite feature, although they are both tagged as UD ADJ and display identical grammatical characteristics.
Definite in other languages: [bej] [bg] [el] [en] [es] [fr] [ga] [hu] [hy] [it] [ky] [myv] [pcm] [pt] [qpm] [sga] [sl] [sv] [tr] [u] [urj] [xcl]