6 - Definiteness effects

Summary

At various points in the discussion so far I have observed that certain positions or contexts within sentences or utterances require a noun phrase occurring there to have a particular value of [± Def] (or to be interpreted as having such a value). Restrictions of this kind, termed “(in)definiteness ecects”, provide the diagnostics for definiteness introduced in Chapter 1. They relate, moreover, to the suggestion that definiteness plays a role in guiding the hearer through the organization of information in discourse, interacting therefore with other concepts and distinctions in the structure of communication. The behaviour of definiteness in its discourse and sentence context is examined in the present chapter.

Discourse structure

We begin by looking at the place of definiteness in that area of pragmatic theory which has been variously termed “discourse structure”, “information structure”, “thematic structure”, among other labels. It is concerned with the ways in which sentences package the message conveyed so as to express the relationship between this message and its context or background. For discussion see Lambrecht (1994), Vallduví and Engdahl (1996).

The organization of information

The oppositions topic–comment, theme–rheme, given–new, presupposition–focus figure prominently in this literature. But the variation in the use of these pairs of terms is considerable. To a large extent they are used interchangeably, though for some writers one opposition closely overlaps with another rather than being equivalent to it; and with each opposition there is variation over whether the terms are taken to denote linguistic expressions or the referents of these expressions. The following remarks represent a synthesis, glossing over much of this variation.