Alcune tendenze nella correlazione tra forma (in)definita dell’aggettivo sloveno e la (in)definitezza del sintagma in ottica contrastiva italo-slovena
Some Correlation Tendencies Between the (In)Definite Form of Slovene Adjectives and the (In)Definiteness of Nominal Phrases from an Italian-Slovene Contrastive Perspective

Summary/Abstract: This paper addresses some aspects of the expression of (in)definiteness in Slovene and Italian. While, in Slovene, a language without a systemic use of articles, (in)definiteness can be considered only as a universal, extralinguistic, semantic/pragmatic category that is inferred implicitly from the context, in Italian, it is fully encoded and is therefore also a grammatical/syntactic category. However, Slovene also displays a specific device in this respect: the definite and indefinite form of the adjective. This paper investigates some correlation tendencies between the definite adjectival form and the definiteness of the noun phrase in which the adjective acts as an attribute (and vice versa, the correlation between the indefinite form of the adjective and the indefiniteness of the respective noun phrase). The contrastive study is based on a corpus of Italian and Slovene texts, as well as their translations, in which Italian has a control function. The results speak in favour of the (in)definiteness correlation between the adjective and the noun phrase, although the indefinite form can also appear in definite noun phrases and the definite one in indefinite noun phrases.

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