Svenskans obestämda plurala artikel ena Lexikon, syntax och pragmatik

Abstract

The Mainland Scandinavian languages have variants of two indefinite singular articles, en (‘a/ an’) and någon (‘any’). In these languages, the article någon also has a plural form, några, but Swedish differs from Danish and Norwegian in that en also has a plural form: ena. Thus, Swedish has a system of two indefinite plural articles. However, the use of ena is restricted and not thoroughly clarified. This study investigates the use of ena as an indefinite plural article in modern Swedish by comparing it to the use of några. Approximately 500 occurrences of noun phrases with ena and några were excerpted from text corpora and analysed with respect to lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic aspects. The analyses are combined with acceptability judgements of ena in different contexts. The results show that ena is less frequent than några in the corpora, and that its use is affected by the lexical context, the information structure, as well as the clause type. Firstly, noun phrases with ena are exclusively evaluative, and the article itself seems to give rise to an evaluative reading. Secondly, ena is principally used in noun phrases describing a referent and accordingly appears with information-structural focus. Finally, ena does not appear in negative polarity contexts, i.e. questions, negative statements and conditionals. Therefore, the analysis suggests that the plural indefinite article ena should be treated as a positive polarity item.