Definiteness (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Definiteness by Christopher Lyons Isaiah WonHo Yoo Definiteness. By Christopher Lyons. (Cambridge textbooks in linguistics series.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xx, 380. $80.00. A number of scholars—Guillaume (1919), Christophersen (1939), Jespersen (1943), Hewson (1972), Hawkins (1978), and Chesterman (1991), just to name a few—have attempted to come up with a comprehensive theory that can explain what it means to be definite or indefinite. Following this time-honored tradition of trying to define ‘definiteness’ is Christopher Lyons, in his book entitled Definiteness. Here L discusses various aspects of definiteness—semantics, pragmatics, and syntax—not only from a theoretical but also from a comparative point of view, investigating how definiteness is encoded in over 150 languages. As a point of departure, L surveys the four major hypotheses on definiteness advanced thus far: familiarity, identifiability, uniqueness, and inclusiveness. According to the familiarity hypothesis in Christophersen 1939, the presence of the definite article indicates that there is shared knowledge between speaker and hearer of the entity that is referred to by the definite article; that is, both the speaker and the hearer are familiar with the referent. However, L points out that the listener’s personal familiarity with the referent is not required for the use of the definite article. He substantiates his argument with the following example (3): (1) The president of Ghana is visiting tomorrow. [End Page 783] He argues that hearers of 1 would infer that Ghana has a president, but they might not necessarily be familiar with the person who is president. L then cites another example where the familiarity hypothesis cannot be applied (6): (2) Pass me the hammer, will you? If this utterance were made to a person who is just entering a room, the hearer would not be familiar with the hammer being referred to. He can only figure out that there must be a hammer in the room, and only upon seeing it can he ‘identify’ the hammer referred to in the utterance. L points out that examples such as the one above led many linguists to embrace identifiability, without completely abandoning familiarity, as the core meaning of definiteness: According to the identifiability hypothesis, the instructs the hearer that the referent is either familiar or identifiable to him. After pointing out that identifiability offers a broader picture than does familiarity for the use of the, L proceeds to discuss the uniqueness account that explains the usage of the in examples for which the identifiability account does not work well, such as associative uses of the (7): (3) [Nurse entering operating theatre] I wonder who the anaesthetist is today. Upon hearing the above utterance, would the hearer be able to identify the anaesthetist in question? In fact, even the speaker of 3 might not be able to identify the anaesthetist in question; otherwise, she would not have made the utterance in the first place. What makes the use of the definite article possible in 3, L argues, is that both participants have shared knowledge that there is generally only one anaesthetist working in the operating room that day. Thus, what the definite article in 3 encodes is not the identifiability but the uniqueness of the referent, which the speaker and hearer share based on common experience. The uniqueness hypothesis, however, cannot account for the uses of the with plural count nouns and mass nouns. L points out that the noun phrases the pens and the butter cannot refer to one unique pen or butter. One hypothesis that can account for such uses of the is the inclusiveness hypothesis by Hawkins 1978, which argues that the signifies totality rather than uniqueness. At this point, it seems as though Hawkins’s inclusiveness hypothesis is the one that offers the most convincing and general explanation for the usage of the definite article. After all, inclusiveness, which encompasses uniqueness, can explain the use of the in 3, where the identifiability account does not work. L, however, cites examples in which, he believes, identifiability works and inclusiveness does not (14): (4) [In a hallway where all four doors are closed. The speaker is dressed in coat and hat, and has a suitcase in each hand...