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This is Definitely Specific: Specificity and Definiteness in Article Systems

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This paper argues for the reality of specificity as noteworthiness, a concept built upon Fodor and Sag’s (1982) view of referentiality. Support for this view of specificity comes from the behavior of indefinite this in spoken English, as well as from specificity markers in Samoan, Hebrew, and Sissala. It is shown that the conditions on the use of this-indefinites cannot be accounted for by previous analyses of specificity. The relationship between definiteness and specificity in article systems crosslinguistically is examined, and a distinction between presuppositions and felicity conditions is argued for. Additional evidence for the reality of specificity comes from a study of article choice in the English of adult second language learners (whose L1s, Russian and Korean, lack articles). It is shown that the learners’ errors are tied to specificity: they consist largely of overuse of the in specific indefinite contexts, and overuse of a in non-specific definite contexts. It is concluded that specificity is a universal semantic distinction, which receives morphological expression crosslinguistically and is available to second language learners.

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  1. Linguistics Department, University of Southern California, 3601 Watt Way, GFS 301, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, USA

    Tania Ionin

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  1. Tania Ionin
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Correspondence to Tania Ionin.

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I am very grateful to Irene Heim for extensive discussion of article semantics. Thanks to Danny Fox, David Pesetsky, Hagit Borer, Ora Matushansky, and Philippe Schlenker for many helpful comments. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for Natural Language Semantics for insightful comments and suggestions. And big thanks to Heejeong Ko and Ken Wexler, my collaborators on the study of specificity in L2 acquisition. All remaining errors are my own.

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Ionin, T. This is Definitely Specific: Specificity and Definiteness in Article Systems. Nat Lang Semantics 14, 175–234 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-005-5255-9

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