INTRODUCTION

The previous chapter has shown that even basic descriptive accounts of article use are very complex, with seemingly more exceptions than regularities. This chapter attempts to answer the question of why this is the case, by looking first at some crucial concepts which underlie article use, namely reference, information flow, countability and definiteness.

REFERENCE

The use of articles is inextricably related to the notion of reference. A basic concept in semantics is the difference between a referring expression and its referent. The latter is a certain entity outside of the realm of language, and the former is the expression used to refer to that entity (J. Lyons, 1977, p. 177). The difference between the two is the source of humour in the following joke and the cause of the oddity of the following sentence (examples from Kreidler, 1998, p. 131): Question: Where can you always find sympathy? Answer: In a dictionary, Washington has three syllables and 600,000 inhabitants, or in the saying The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work.

Referents can be classified on the basis of a number of characteristics. One basic distinction is between fixed (also called constant) referents and variable referents. Fixed reference occurs when the referent is a universally unique entity (independently of context), as in Lake Erie. Variable reference characterizes those referring expressions whose referents may be different every time they are used, as in we swam in a lake. The referent of a noun phrase which has variable reference is established on the basis of a variety of sources of information, including context (both physical and linguistic), general knowledge, etc. However, it is possible for nouns with fixed reference to be used with variable reference, as in these examples: every city has a Greenwich village, this fellow is an Einstein, no Shakespeare wrote this play (Kreidler, 1998, p. 135).

In fact, the fixedness of reference appears not to be absolute: even with expressions that are normally classified as having a fixed reference, for example, the Eiffel Tower, it is possible for that expression in a sentence, for example, look at the Eiffel Tower refer to a model of the famous tower, or a piece of jewellery that is shaped to resemble it, or to the half-size copy that stands in Las Vegas.