Reflection: Marking definiteness

Many European languages are like English in having a separate word (or words) marking definiteness. Other languages, such as the Scandinavian languages Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Icelandic and the Semitic languages Hebrew, Arabic and Kurdish, use an affix rather than a separate word. Yet other languages, such as Latvian, Xhosa and Indonesian, regularly deploy a demonstrative (e.g. this, that) for this purpose. English can also use a demonstrative to signal definiteness (try substituting this or that for the in sentence [2.3(a)] above), but it is not regularly deployed just to mark definiteness in the way that the is. Still other languages, such as Chinese, Japanese and Russian (and many other Slavic languages), use none of these resources to mark definiteness. This is why, of course, a distinctive feature of English spoken by speakers of these languages is the lack of the definite article (consider this sentence written by a Japanese pragmatics student: It is principle of conversation). Indeed, some research on marking definiteness in English in interactions where all the participants are “non-native” speakers, has suggested that dropping the definite article in some instances where it would be required in “standard” forms of English, and inserting it where it would not normally be grammatically required, is a feature of English as a lingua franca (see, for instance, Seidlhofer 2001).

It is not the case that any one form, such as the examples of definite expressions in Table 2.1, will always have a referring function, which, incidentally, is partly why these are pragmatic, not semantic, issues. Consider this sentence:

This is not likely to be referring to a particular bus but to any vehicle with the attributes of a bus. It is a non-referential, descriptive usage of a definite expression, as opposed to a referential usage (this distinction was labelled attributive versus referential by Donnellan 1966). Here, we are talking about buses as opposed to any other mode of transport: the definite expression invites the interpreter to work out the more general category (transport) of which this is a specific sub-category (buses). So, in this case, the definite expression is not used to signal an act of identification but a distinction between the specific and the general. Additionally, we might note here that indefinite expressions can also refer. Consider this sentence:

Clearly, we are referring to a particular, identifiable bus in a particular context, despite the fact that an indefinite article is used. Compare this with a non-referring usage of an indefinite expression, such as:

We will examine the functions of referring expressions, including defi nite expressions, more closely.

We use proper nouns to invite hearers to identify the unique individual (or set of individuals) we are talking about. Proper nouns inherently identify a unique individual (or set of individuals); they have definiteness built in (and thus appear as a sub-category of definite expressions in Table 2.1). This fact may partly explain why, in English, one would not normally put a definite article before a proper noun: the Jonathan or the Michael sounds decidedly odd (except in limited contexts such as that’s not the Jonathan I was talking about; see also the reflection box below). However, this is not a full explanation, because some other languages do allow a definite article before a proper noun. For example, in some dialects of Italian definite articles are systematically used before personal names (e.g. la Maria) and, in Italian generally, they are used before names of countries (e.g. la Germania). 2 This is not as bizarre as it may seem to the native English speaker. A century ago, Russell (1910–1911) argued that proper nouns are not just empty shells used to refer to a particular individual, but are associated with a descriptive content which determines what they refer to, somewhat like definite common noun phrases such as the book.