Cover not available
Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 11:4 (2001) ► pp.401–420

Definiteness and reflexivity

Indexing socially shared experience

This paper examines the use of definite and indefinite noun phrases in everyday conversations in Finnish and English to establish meaning and to alter and build context in interaction. The paper shows that participants in conversation use the formal contrast between definite and indefinite NPs not only to express identifiability and non-identifiability of the referent to their addressees, but that they also use it dynamically to make claims about socially shared reality, to create referents in discourse and to build a novel identity for existing referents, to actively construct frames and create roles within them, and to reorganize the participant structure of a speech event.

Keywords: Definiteness, Reference, Interaction, Roles, Participant structure, Presupposition, Frames
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 1 December 2001
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.11.4.03lau
References
Burton-Roberts, Noel
(1989) The Limits to Debate: A Revised Theory of Semantic Presupposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  BoPGoogle Scholar
Chafe, Wallace
(1976) Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In Charles N. Li (ed.), Subject and Topic. New York: Academic Press, pp. 25-55.Google Scholar
(1994) Discourse, consciousness, and time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  BoPGoogle Scholar
Christophersen, Paul
(1939) The Articles: A study of their theory and use in English. Copenhagen: Einar Munksgaard.Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert H
(1977) Bridging. In P.N. Johnson-Laird and P.C. Wason (eds.), Thinking. Readings in Cognitive Science.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 411-420.Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert H. and Susan E. Haviland
(1977) Comprehension and the Given-New Contract. In Roy O. Freedle (ed.), Discourse Production and Comprehension. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex pp. 1-40.Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert H. and Catherine R. Marshall
(1981) Definite reference and mutual knowledge. In Aravind K. Joshi, Bonnie L. Webber and Ivan A. Sag (eds.), Elements of Discourse Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 10-63.Google Scholar
DuBois, John W
(1980) Beyond definiteness: The trace of identity in discourse. In Wallace Chafe (ed.), The Pear Stories: Cultural, cognitive and linguistic aspects of narrative production. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, pp. 203-274.Google Scholar
(2000) Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. CD-ROM. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium. [[URL]]Google Scholar
Du Bois, John W., Stephan Schuetze-Coburn, Danae Paolino and Susanna Cumming
(1993) Outline of discourse transcription. In Jane E. Edwards and Martin D. Lambert (eds.), Transcription and Coding Methods for Language Research. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Donnellan, Keith
(1971) Reference and definite descriptions. In D. Steinberg and L. Jakobovits (eds.), Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 100-114.Google Scholar
Erkü, Feride and Jeanette K. Gundel
(1987) The pragmatics of indirect anaphors. In Jef Verschueren and Marcella Bertucelli-Papi (eds.), The Pragmatic Perspective: Selected papers from the 1985 International Pragmatics Conference . Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 533-545. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Epstein, Richard
(1999) Roles, Frames and Definiteness. In Karen van Hoek, Andrej A. Kibrik, and Leo Noordman (eds.), Discourse Studies in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 53-74. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fauconnier, Gilles
(1985) Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Reprinted 1994, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  BoPGoogle Scholar
(1997) Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logo  MetBibGoogle Scholar
Fillmore, Charles J
(1982) Frame Semantics. InLinguistics in the Morning Calm . Seoul: Hanshin, pp. 111-137.Google Scholar
Fox, Barbara
(1987) Discourse structure and anaphora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Frege, Gottlob
(1892) Über Sinn und Bedeutung. Zeischrift für Philosophie und Philosophische Kritik. 1001: 22-50. Also in P.T. Geach and M. Black. 1952. Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 56-78.Google Scholar
Gundel, Jeanette K., Nancy Hedberg, and Ron Zacharski
(1993) Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language 691: 274-307. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goffman, Erving
(1981) Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell.  BoPGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, John A
(1978) Definiteness and Indefiniteness: A study in reference and grammaticality prediction. London: Croom Helm.  BoPGoogle Scholar
Heim, Irene
(1983) File Change Semantics and the Familiarity Theory of Definiteness. In Rainer Bäuerle, Christopher Schwartze and Armin von Stechow (eds.), Meaning, Use and Interpretation in Language.Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 164-189. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hintikka, Jaakko and Lauri Carlson
(1977) Pronouns of laziness in game-theoretical linguistics. Theoretical Linguistics 4(1/2): 1-29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Karttunen, Lauri
(1976) Discourse referents. In James D. McCawley (ed.), Syntax and Semantics, vol. 7: Notes from the Linguistic Underground . New York: Academic Press, pp. 363-385. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud
(1994) Information Structure and Sentence Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
(2001) Definiteness. In Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola sstman, Jan Blommaert and Chris Bulcaen (eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics, 1999 installment. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lyons, Christopher
(1999) Definiteness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Marmaridou, Sophia S.A
(2000) Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Partee, Barbara Hall
(1972) Opacity, coreference and pronouns. In Davidson, D. and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, pp. 415-441. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pekarek, Simona
(1998) Deixis and the interactional construction of context. In: University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 5.1: 127-138.Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen
(1981) Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In P. Cole (ed.), Radical Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, pp. 223-255.Google Scholar
Russell, Bertrand
(1905) On denoting. Mind 141: 479-493. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sakahara, Shigeru
(1996) Roles and identificational copular sentences. In Gilles Fauconnier and Eve Sweetser (eds.), Spaces, Worlds and Grammar.Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 262-289.Google Scholar
Sbis B, Marina
(1999) Ideology and the persuasive use of presupposition. In Jef Verschueren (ed.), Language and Ideology: Selected Papers from the 6th International Pragmatics Conference. Vol. I1. Antwerp: International Pragmatics Association, pp. 495-509.Google Scholar
Seppänen, Eeva-Leena
(1998) Läsnäolon pronominit. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael
(1981) The Limits of Awareness. Sociolinguistic Working Papers 841. Austin, Texas: Southwest Educational Development Lab.Google Scholar
Strawson, Peter F
(1950) On referring. Mind 591: 320-344. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Vilkuna, Maria
(1992) Referenssi ja määräisyys suomenkielisten tekstien tulkinnassa. [Reference and definiteness in the interpretation of Finnish-language texts]. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Pajusalu, Renate
2008. Pragmatics of quantifiers: The case of Estonian kõik ‘all’. Journal of Pragmatics 40:11 ► pp. 1950 ff. DOI logo
Rudd, Philip W.
2022. Weapons of mass destruction. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 499 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 1 september 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.