Eckhard Bick - VISL

from personal pronouns, are not mutually exclusive 141 . Thus, there are
relatives/interrogative that at the same time are indefinites. Those of them that allow
@>N usage, fall in my DET-AB category, too (quantas, quais ...). The
relative/interrogative ‘cujo’ seems to have its own distributional type, DET-ABC, since
it doesn’t allow possessives (C) to its right. However, in my view the exclusion of
possessives right of ‘cujo’ is a semantic clash (‘cujo’ itself expresses possession, too)
rather than a syntactic rule. After all, sentences like the following are not entirely
agrammatical:
A empresa, cujos meus ações já vendi há cinco mesos, andava muito mal
‘Outro’, which is often included among the indefinites, has a special distribution, too.
As mentioned above, it can – like ‘mesmo’ - follow B- and C-determiners. Where
semantically possible, this holds for AB-determiners, too. It is for semantic reasons that
‘outro’, but not ‘mesmo’ can follow ‘um’: both ‘outro’ and ‘um’ are indefinite, but
‘mesmo’ isn’t. Unlike the other two “identity modifiers”, ‘outro’ can fill the leftmost
slot in an np – but it hereby acquires another meaning:
um outro livro (‘a different book’)
outro livro (‘yet another book’)
A few other indefinites (‘vários’, ‘diversos’) have a double distribution as either DET-
AB @>N (‘some’, ‘a number of’) or as @N< (‘different’). Since the change in meaning
occurs when filling the @NN constituent
141 Not to mention the striking fact that the closed classes of relatives and interrogatives comprise exactly the same words,
making these categories purely syntactic-semantic.
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