Response to Abbott

Abstract

Abbott raises two major objections to our analysis of definites in there-sentences (Ward & Birner 1995): first, that it uses the term HEARER-NEW in a way that differs significantly from the original definition given in Prince 1992, and second, that it fails to account for the data. We will address these issues in turn. It is true that we extend the use of the terms hearer-old and hearer-new (and, correspondingly, discourse-old and discourse-new) in two related ways. First, Prince restricts their use to describing the information status of entities realized as NPs. It seems clear, however, that such statuses are also applicable to, for example, events, locations, and properties that may be realized as VPs, PPs, AdjPs, etc. (see Birner 1994). Second, Prince in fact recognizes three distinct categories of given/new: discourse-old/discourse-new, hearer-old/hearer-new, and focus/presupposition. By analyzing an entity as representing a hearer-new instantiation of the focus variable in an open proposition, we implicitly assume that the three categories are not mutually exclusive, but rather that the focus of an open proposition itself has an independent discourseand hearer-status. In fact, it's unclear to us why the fact that we extend Prince's usage of this term should constitute counterevidence to the claim in question. While it is true that we extend Prince's theory in a direction that Prince herself did not envision, such an extension is not in itself a shortcoming; on the contrary, it is an improvement if it handles the data in a unified and predictive way. In connection with this same criticism, Abbott notes that sentences like Then there is that resentment in her example 2 contain an explicit marker of hearerold status (i.e. the demonstrative); however, as explained in our original analysis, the entity in such cases is being marked as simultaneously hearer-old (in that it has been previously evoked) and hearer-new (in that the hearer is not expected to recall it). Thus, it is not at all surprising that an indication of hearerold status would be present; in fact, such a state of affairs is entailed by the analysis of these tokens as reminders: something must be (assumed to be) hearer-old in order for the hearer to be reminded of it. The claim is merely that it is being TREATED as hearer-new. For this same reason, Abbott's remark that 'the obvious way to treat an entity as hearer-new would be to refer to it using an indefinite NP' misses the mark, since referring to the entity in this way would treat it ONLY as hearer-new and omit the crucial treatment as SIMULTANEOUSLY hearer-old and hearer-new that signals the NP's reminder status. Moreover, indefiniteness correlates only indirectly with hearer-new status, by virtue of marking information as not being uniquely identifiable (see Hawkins 1978, 1991, Gundel et al. 1993, inter alia). Thus, just as accommodation involves the use of a definite in a context where it has not (strictly speaking) been licensed, the