Definiteness in Discourse

Abstract

A recent study has attempted to relate definiteness to topicalization. In an utterance with two nominals, there is a tendency to distinguish the nominals in the topic from the nominal in the comment by marking the former with the and the latter with a, for in discourse the speaker must presuppose of his listener knowledge of topic (the + noun), and ignorance of comment (a + noun). However, since this clearly assumes that use of the is related to knowledge, and a to lack of knowledge, the present study attempts to test these assumptions. The results of two experiments support the hypotheses.