INTRODUCTION

The first chapter of this book presented descriptive approaches to articles, while the second one looked at the key concepts behind the use of articles, most notably reference, definiteness and countability. It was shown that the philosophy of language and semantics have contributed to the understanding of these notions. This chapter provides a brief overview of some other important linguistic approaches to articles.

SOCIO-PRAGMATIC APPROACHES

One important development in the philosophy of language which has direct relevance to the study of articles is the work of Paul Grice. A closer look at instances involving the use of the definite article makes it clear that the instances of its use are not only dependent on the preceding text as such, but on general pragmatic knowledge, and on the situational context. Therefore, the motivation for the use of the definite article lies outside language as such. As is acknowledged in the Longman Grammar, “the interpretation of definite noun phrases often requires extensive pragmatic inferencing on the part of the addressee” (p. 264). In fact, making inferences is what the listeners do in order to preserve a sense of coherence in what they are told. This is the reason why traditional sentence-based semantics cannot fully account for many linguistic phenomena, including the use of articles. It is clear that an analysis of the use of articles cannot be complete without recourse to pragmatics.

The first theory that managed to account for inferencing was formulated by Grice as the principle of conversational implicature (Grice, 1975), which was later extended and developed into relevance theory by Sperber and Wilson (Sperber & Wilson, 1995). The Gricean maxims (Grice, 1975) of conversational cooperation (of quality, quantity, relevance, manner) explain why, in the following exchange:

• A: Did you give Mary the money?

• B: I’m waiting for her right now.

The inferred answer to A's question is negative. In the theory of relevance, the hearer's inferential strategy is motivated by a single principle of relevance, which holds that “Every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance” (Sperber & Wilson, 1995, p. 158).