Definiteness defined as unique identifiability
Definiteness, most often marked with a definite article the in English, can be defined in many different ways. But probably most well-known and widely-used theories will be the givenness framework by Irene Heim and the unique identifiability framework by Bertrand Russell. In my studies, I used the latter framework to investigate how definiteness influences second language processing. A self-paced reading study was published in Second Language Research in January 2021, and an eye-tracking study was recently accepted and is currently in press. The accepted author manuscript is available here.
Below is a short summary of the self-paced reading study, which is a modified replication of Clifton (2013).
- (a) In the kitchen, Jason checked out the stove very carefully.
- (b) In the kitchen, Jason checked out a stove very carefully.
- (c) In the appliance store, Jason checked out the stove very carefully.
- (d) In the appliance store, Jason checked out a stove very carefully.
Among the four sentences, only (a) and (d) will be accepted as natural by most native speakers of English. The kitchen is a typical place where there is a single stove, which will be uniquely identifiable. When both the speaker and the listener share the presupposition that there is a uniquely identifiable entity, the definite article the is used. On the other hand, the appliance store is a typical place where there are multiple stoves displayed simultaneously; hence, without proper contexts, presupposing a uniquely identifiable stove in such an environment is infelicitous. Then, an indefinite article a makes better sense.
Participants pressed the space bar on the keyboard to read a fragment of a sentence at a time, and the time it took for them to read each fragment was recorded on a computer. The critical region I was interested in was where either "the stove" or "a stove" was given. Encountering "a stove" when the discourse was built around the kitchen or running into "the" when the discourse was built around a place where multiple entities were presupposed delayed participants' reading times. That is, reading ungrammatical sentences (b) or (c) took longer than reading grammatical sentences (a) or (d). However, not all ungrammatical sentences were equal. Below is the summary of main findings:
- Native speakers' slowdown for ungrammatical sentences occurred right after the critical region.
- An indefinite article in the unique referent condition (b) did not cause as long a delay as a definite article in the non-unique referent condition (c).
- Both advanced and intermediate learner groups (L1-Korean L2-English speakers) slowed down when they encountered "a stove" in the critical region regardless of the previous context.
- The advanced L2 group's slowdown for ungrammatical sentences occurred one region later than their native counterparts.
- The intermediate L2 group never slowed down for ungrammtical sentences, which shows their lack of sensitivity to the interaction between definiteness and uniqueness.