A MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF DEFINITE NOUNS IN DANISH

In the Scandinavian languages, including Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish, there are two ways definiteness can be expressed in a noun phrase: by a suffix on the noun or by a prenominal lexical determiner. The distribution of the two definiteness markers differs among the languages and among dialects. In this paper we focus on definiteness marking in standard Danish. The two ways of marking definiteness are illustrated in (1): (1a) contains the definite suffix, and (1b) a prenominal definite article. We refer to forms like hesten in (1a) as definite nouns.