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(If anyone could please help me with plain English, I would greatly appreciate it)

I just don't understand why 'an entity typically ...' can be reason enough to support the notion of 'the vast majority can be accounted for under either view.'

Is it my limited understanding of the English used here that's hindering the uptake, or the authors' unreasonable logic? To me 'an entity ...' only explains how there is a great deal of overlap between the set of entities that are familiar to the hearer and the set of entities that are uniquely identifiable to the hearer. To me it seems this does not explain that the two theories combined cover the vast majority of uses.

Research into the meaning of the English definite article has generally been approached from one of two perspectives, characterizable as 'familiarity' and 'uniqueness.' That is, felicitous use of the definite article has been argued to require that the referent of the NP be either familiar within the discourse or uniquely identifiable to the hearer. The vast majority of uses can be accounted for under either view, since an entity typically must be familiar in a given discourse in order to be identifiable to the hearer.

*NP: noun phrase, i.e. a noun with modifiers, or just a bare noun. (This annotation is added by Sssamy)

('Uniqueness, Familiarity, and the Definite Article in English' by Betty Birner and Gregory Ward)

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

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  • If it is uniquely identifiable to the hearer, would that not also make it familiar?
    – Robusto
    Commented Jan 18, 2015 at 0:49
  • It would very much. But that does not support the idea of the majority of uses are accounted for by 'unique identifiability' and 'familiarity' combined ....
    – Sssamy
    Commented Jan 18, 2015 at 0:58

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The author is not saying that "the two theories combined cover the vast majority of uses." He is saying that each theory independently covers the vast majority of uses, because in any particular discourse an entity which is identifiable (known to the hearer as a specific individual) almost always has to be familiar (mentioned previously in the discourse), too. Consequently, any entity which qualifies under the identifiability theory also qualifies under the familiarity theory.

However, I do think the author has this backward. An entity may be identifiable because of the speakers' common experience of the world without having been mentioned previously in the discourse: "The President of the United States", for instance. But any entity which has been mentioned previously is by virtue of that fact identifiable: as the one which has been mentioned.

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  • Hi, StoneyB. Thanks. Where are the authors saying each theory covers the majority of uses, or how could you interpret that from where? From the first sentence with 'generally been approached from one of two perspectives'? 'Generally' here is taken to mean 'in the majority of uses'?
    – Sssamy
    Commented Jan 18, 2015 at 1:08
  • @Sssamy In the phrase can be accounted for under either view.
    – StoneyB on hiatus
    Commented Jan 18, 2015 at 1:12
  • Okay. I've just re-read the part for the hundredth time. So are they supposing, in this paper, 'unique identifiability' alone accounts for the majority of uses, which is not written? This is the very beginning of the paper.
    – Sssamy
    Commented Jan 18, 2015 at 1:21
  • @Sssamy No. If you jump to the end you find “We have shown that no single factor proposed—familiarity, uniqueness, or relevance—can alone account for the full distribution of the definite article in English. In particular, pragmatic factors such as the inferred intent of the speaker and the differentiability of referents contribute crucially to the interpretation of the definite article.”
    – StoneyB on hiatus
    Commented Jan 18, 2015 at 1:25
  • Yes, that's to conclude this paper, but how could you tell how 'an entity typically must be familiar in order to be identifiable' leads to 'the vast majority of uses can be explained with either of the theories without that supposition? The first quote does not sound like a reason for the 'majority of uses' to me.
    – Sssamy
    Commented Jan 18, 2015 at 1:39

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