Abstract
Capitalizing on a corpus of natural language data representing a mainstream urban variety of Canadian English, this chapter investigates the alternation of a(n) with so-called indefinite this to mark specific indefinite noun phrases encoding discourse-new referents. Operationalizing a number of potential social and linguistic constraints on variant choice, multivariate analysis reveals that speaker sex, syntactic position of the noun phrase, humanness of the referent, and topic persistence make significant contributions to the selection of indefinite this. Contextualization of the results in relation to the larger cross-linguistic phenomenon of differential argument marking affords key insights into motivations for variant selection. Indefinite this is shown to be a discriminatory marker of pragmatically prominent indefinite NPs that exhibit a significant propensity to occur as topics in the ensuing discourse, a finding which has parallels with the cataphoric properties of differentially marked indefinite NPs in other languages.
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