Prag: Treppenhaus

Salience and Definiteness Klaus von Heusinger Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 67 (1997), 5-23.

• Contents
• Introduction
• PDF-Datei (130K)

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Definite Expressions
2.1 Proper Names
2.2 Definite NPs
2.3 Demonstratives
2.4 Personal Pronouns
2.5 Possessives

3. The Uses of Definite NPs

3.1 Anaphoric Linkage
3.2 Relational Dependency
3.3 Situational Salience
3.4 Uniques

4. Three Theories of Definiteness

4.1 Russell’s Theory of Descriptions
4.2 Heim and Kamp’s Familiarity theory
4.3 Löbner’s Relational Approach

5. The Salience Theory of Definiteness

5.1 Lewis’ Theory of Salience
5.2 The Praguian School
5.3 The AI approach
5.4 Salience and Discourse

6. Salience and Choice Functions

6.1 The situational use
6.2 The anaphoric use
6.3 The relational use of definite NPs

Summary
References

Introduction

The concept of definiteness in natural language is of special interest because it seems to be pragmatic in nature but it has semantic impact. The analysis of definite expressions exhibits some aspects of the fuzzy borderline between semantics and pragmatics and the interaction between the two areas. In this paper, I will examine four semantic theories about definiteness with particular view on English. I conclude that the pragmatic concept of “salience” is the underlying principle for definiteness. However, no theory has given a formal account of this pragmatic principle. I show that choice functions provide the adequate means to reconstruct salience in a formal theory. They are functions that assign to each non-empty set one of its elements. In this formal approach the pragmatic principle of salience gets its semantic reconstruction which yields a unified account of the semantics of definite noun phrases and pronouns.
 The paper is organized in the following way: In the second section I introduce five different groups of definite expressions, namely proper names, definite NPs, demonstratives, personal pronouns, and possessive constructions. In the third section, I focus on definite NPs as the most complex kind of definite expressions and discuss the relevant contexts where they are used: the anaphoric linkage, the relational dependency, the situational salience, and the unique case.
In the fourth section, I shortly sketch three semantic theories of definiteness. Each of the theories focuses on one of the typical contexts of definite expressions: Russell’s Theory of Descriptions focuses on uniques, Kamp and Heim’s familiarity theory takes the anaphoric use as fundamental, and Löbner’s relational approach bases definiteness on relational dependencies. However, none of these three theories gives a complete picture of all uses of definite NPs. Therefore, the more general salience approach is presented in the fourth section. In this approach, the context crucially contributes to the interpretation of the definite NP by forming a salience hierarchy among the potential referents. It is assumed that each context can be associated with an ordering among the elements of subsets of the domain of discourse. This ordering reconstructs the intuitive idea of a salience hierarchy. The three historical sources of this salience theory are outlined: Lewis’ semantic criticism of Russell, the linguistic conception of the Prague School and the investigation of AI researen any attempt to formalize the principle of salience.
 In the sixth section, I give a formal representation of the concept of salience by means of context dependent choice functions, which pick out from a set one of its elements or a “representative”. Due to this formal account of the pragmatic principle of salience it becomes possible to reconstruct definiteness in the logical representation of natural expressions. It will be shown that the developed formalism can uniformly describe all four different uses of definite NPs.

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