This chapter sets the scene by presenting some basic issues and ideas, which will be investigated in greater depth in the rest of the study. It begins by examining the concept of definiteness itself, to establish a preliminary account of what this concept amounts to. This is followed by consideration of the various types of noun phrase which are generally regarded as definite or indefinite – since definiteness and indefiniteness are not limited to noun phrases introduced by the or a. Finally, some basic ideas concerning the syntactic structure of noun phrases are presented in outline. English is taken as the starting point, with comparative observations on other languages where appropriate, because it is easier and less confusing to outline basic issues as they are instantiated in one language, where this can be done, than to hop from one language to another. For this purpose, English serves as well as any language, since it has readily identifiable lexical articles, which make definite and indefinite noun phrases on the whole easy to distinguish. It is important to bear in mind that the discussion in this chapter is preliminary, and aims at a tentative and provisional account of the points examined. Many of the proposals made here and solutions suggested to problems of analysis will be refined as the study progresses.

What is definiteness?

I begin in this section by attempting to establish in informal, pretheoretical terms what the intuitions about meaning are that correspond to our terming a noun phrase “definite” or “indefinite”.