ABSTRACT
This chapter describes and analyses the trilingual material. It discusses various theoretical frameworks which have been applied to the phenomena in question. The chapter presents an approach based on semantic recursion. The basic taxonomy is based on Jespersen, Smirnickij, and other Jespersen-related contemporary traditional grammars of English. Both actualisation and functional perspective are much closer to natural logic, to the system of regularities and rules displayed by language itself and not imposed on it by any existing logical system. A small minority of sentences is semantic-recursion-free and some of these can be compared to Bar-Hillel's non-indexical expressions or Quine's eternal sentences. Naturally, recursion-free sentences do not contain any semantic-recursion triggers. It is suggested here that the absence of any semantic recursion, the lack of necessity to perform any operation of semantic recursion, characterises the unmarked, non-expressed case of article use. The classification itself, based on the language-independent phenomenon of semantic recursion, would claim the status of a substantive universal.
