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Nominal definiteness in English. Hawkins' (1991) account and some

modifications

Article · January 2002

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D. Trenkic, Views and Voices 1 (2002) pp.53-71

Nominal definiteness in English – Hawkins’ (1991) account and some

modifications

Introduction
Nominal definiteness is typically expressed in a language through a
system of articles. In English this system is realised as the definite article the, the
indefinite article a, and their absence.
The nature of nominal definiteness, especially as expressed through the system
of English articles, has been intensely discussed for almost a century now. Two major
research traditions can be easily distinguished: one is associated with Russell’s
seminal work ‘On denoting’ and the ensuing semantic and philosophico-logical
tradition, the other is associated with traditional and pedagogical grammars. The
major difference between the two traditions is that the former aims to establish what
articles mean, the latter how they are used. While it is reasonable to assume that the
relationship between what something means and how it is used should be fairly
straightforward and strong, this proved not to be the case with the system of English
articles. Namely, the philosophico-logical tradition has regularly invoked two notions
– existence and uniqueness – to account for the meanings of the English articles. And
these accounts worked fairly well with nouns referring to entities occurring as
concrete, countable and in the singular form. However, when grammarians confronted
the task of describing the totality of language, and its use, they had to deal with
articles (and their absence) occurring with a whole range of nominals, including
plural, abstract, mass, or proper nouns, non-referential nominals, and so on. As a
result, the elegant accounts of the philosophico-logical tradition necessarily turned
messier. Suddenly it seemed as if the articles had far more uses than their respective
meanings could account for. New meanings like ‘familiarity’ and ‘identifiability’
were invoked, but they could not cover all the uses either. The consequence was that
traditional grammars suffered from the lack of explanation of the ‘meaning’ of articles
(cf. Bodelsen 1949:284) which would account for all their uses, and were plagued
with extremely long lists of ‘exceptions’. In fact, ‘exceptions’ became the main
concern of traditional grammars. Jespersen thus writes that “it is impossible to give a
small number of settled rules available for all cases” (1949:404) and Kruisinga argues
that “the use of the definite article, and still more its absence, is often a matter of
tradition depending upon the system of grammar in older periods of English”
(1932:238), hence the various uses “can be ‘explained’ historically as regards their
origin, not as regards their position in living English” (ibid.). It is also worth noting
that the most influential grammars of English of the early 20th century were written by
native speakers of other European languages which do have the category of articles,
and that these authors were most intrigued by how the uses of English articles differ
from those of their own languages. Zandvoort sums up this interest with the claim that
the use of the definite articles in English is “more restricted than in some other
languages” ([1957]1975:117), and that the use of the indefinite article in English is
“less restricted than in some other languages” (ibid:124). The result is that traditional
grammars often offer no more than classified lists of nouns that do or do not appear
with one of the articles, like names of diseases, languages, colours, streets, musical
instruments, mountains, mountain ranges, countries in singular, countries in plural,
etc.
Modern pedagogical grammars and materials still follow closely the accounts
developed in the traditional grammars, when it comes to articles: their uses are still
presented as a long list of rules, followed by an even longer list of exceptions, or
D. Trenkic, Views and Voices 1 (2002) pp.53-71

‘special uses’ (cf. Quirk et al. 1991). At no point is a unifying principle (or meaning)
offered, which could systematically account for all the uses (and absences) of articles.
It is no wonder that EFL learners, particularly those whose L1s do not recognise a
corresponding category, have always been baffled by the unpredictable and obscure
nature and behaviour of the English articles.
However, there has been a significant breakthrough in the field of theory in the
last ten years, and some accounts were proposed which could potentially account for
all the uses of English articles. We present here one such model, that of Hawkins
(1978, 1991). Hawkins’ model accounts superbly for the use of overt articles in
English, but is silent on the question of interpretation of the absence of articles. In the
second part of the paper we offer an original proposal of how this issue could be
treated, to complement Hawkins’ account, and so to provide a complete account of
the meaning and use of English articles and their absence in discourse.
While it is outside the scope of this paper to propose new pedagogical
materials, we believe that insights from the model we develop here, following
Hawkins, might serve, if rightly pitched, as a basis for a new, more systematic
approach to teaching this difficult point to EFL learners.

Hawkins’ account of definiteness

Hawkins’ (1978, 1991) account of definiteness offers a thorough
theoretical account of the meaning and use of English articles. He draws on several
traditions and brings together the most valuable insights from the logic, pragmatic and
the traditional grammar accounts.
Hawkins’ account on English articles is most widely known through his 1978
work, in which he laid the foundation for the ‘locational theory’. This work in
principle refined and polished ideas from Christophersen’s (1939) ‘familiarity theory’,
in the light of Searle’s (1969) ‘speech-act theory’. Since 1978, however, many flaws
in need of modification were pointed out in Hawkins’ account, and many proposals
were offered to overcome these limitations (cf. Lyons 1980; Klein 1980; Harris 1980;
Burton-Roberts 1981; Chesterman 1991). Hawkins himself took these critiques
aboard and provided a modified and more finely grained version of the original theory
in his 1991 article. Although at points more technical, this later account is going to
serve as a basis for the presentation of his work in this paper. As most of the literature
still relies on the terminology from the previous work, reference to it will be provided
whenever a crucial term from the new version differs from the original term used.

The definite article the

According to Hawkins, “the conventionally implicates that there is
some subset of entities, {P}, in the universe of discourse which is mutually manifest
to speaker and hearer on-line and within which definite referents exist and are unique”
(1991:414).
As can already be seen from the above definition, it combines ideas from at
least four different traditions: Russellian (existence and uniqueness), Gricean
(conventional implicature), more recent work of Kamp (1984) on discourse
representation theory (subsets of entities in the universe of discourse) and of Sperber
and Wilson (1986) on relevance (mutual manifestness).
In what follows we shall elaborate on the main notions comprised in the above
definition by Hawkins (1991).
Going back to Russell (1905), Hawkins revives the idea that the logical
meaning of the can be summed up in terms of the existence and uniqueness of a
D. Trenkic, Views and Voices 1 (2002) pp.53-71

referent. In a more pragmatic tradition, however, Hawkins relativises the uniqueness

claim to the context of utterance (in his terminology: P-sets - see below). Also, as he
deals with plural definites and mass nouns, alongside singular count definites (which
were the only concern of work in the Russellian tradition), the notion of uniqueness
had to be modified so as to accommodate plurality. In his earlier work (1978), instead
of ‘uniqueness’ Hawkins uses the term ‘inclusiveness’, meaning that all referents
satisfying the description are included and no referent satisfying the description is
excluded from reference:

(1) Would you wash up the dishes please? (Æ all the dishes that need washing)

Uniqueness, then, was just a subset of inclusiveness, where the number of referents
satisfying the description was exactly one. Parts of this definition were criticised (cf.
Burton-Roberts 1981), on the grounds that not all entities satisfying the description
are always and necessarily included in reference:

(2) There are cracks in the paving stones. (Burton-Roberts 1981:193)

It was pointed out that for this sentence to be true, it does not have to be the case that
all paving stones (within a relevant context) have cracks in them. To account for this,
Hawkins makes a distinction “between reference to a set and quantification over all its
members” (1991:409), and switches back from ‘inclusiveness’, which implies
reference to all entities satisfying the description within a relevant context, to
Russellian ‘uniqueness’. For uniqueness to encompass plural expressions, it is
claimed that the actually signals that “there is some unique maximal set of entities
within a P-set to which a definite expression refers” (Hawkins 1991:410). The unique
maximal set in the case of singular expressions comprises just one member.
Uniqueness and existence, as in most pragmatic accounts are relativised to the
context of utterance. The context, in this account, is thought of as consisting of a
number of pragmatically delimited sets (P-sets). In his previous work, Hawkins
talks about ‘shared sets’ between speaker and hearer. This view was evidently
influenced by the idea of common ground, mutual knowledge or shared beliefs (see
for example Clark and Marshall 1981, Smith 1982, Stalnaker 1978). All these views,
including Hawkins’ own, suffered from the fact that beliefs, knowledge or sets of
entities do not actually have to be (already) shared between speaker and hearer at the
moment of utterance, they can also be formed on-line (in the linguistic and/or
situational information provided), brought about by the mere fact that the reference
act occurred. Thus in the example:

(3) Someone has stolen the wheels of my bike.

at the moment of utterance the speaker and the hearer do not have to ‘share’ any set in
which the wheels would exist and be unique (inclusive) - the existence and uniqueness
of the wheels are relative to the set formed within the noun phrase they occur in - the
wheels of my bike.
In order to allow for such possibilities, Hawkins divides the concept of shared
sets into its forming components – ‘sets’ and ‘sharedness’. ‘Sharedness’ is reanalysed
in the light of Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory, as mutual manifestness on-
line. The speaker does not have to assume previous knowledge of the referent on the
hearer’s part, but he has to assume that the referents will be (able to become) manifest
D. Trenkic, Views and Voices 1 (2002) pp.53-71

to his interlocutor in the present context1. Under the influence of Kamp’s discourse
representation theory (1984), Hawkins postulates a rich pragmatic structuring of
entities within the universe of discourse, and reanalyses the notion ‘sets’ as
pragmatically delimited sets (P-sets): the immediate situation set, the previous
discourse set, general knowledge sets, and a line of associative sets stemming from
these. It is relative to these sets that the existence and uniqueness of definite referents
hold. Hawkins does not explain in greater detail what P-sets are, but the idea is
intuitively clear: P-sets are the context of utterance (or the ‘mutual knowledge/shared
beliefs’, or ‘the universe of discourse’) carved up on the grounds for knowing other
minds – namely on the grounds of participants’ general knowledge of the world, the
immediate situation of utterance, or the previous discourse (cf. the generic, deictic and
text file in Givón (1989:207), or community membership knowledge, physical co-
presence, linguistic co-presence and indirect co-presence in Clark and Marshall 1981).
A list of some possible sets with examples is provided:

• Previous discourse set - comprises entities that have been entered into the universe
of discourse by being mentioned during the course of the current linguistic
exchange:
(4) I was reading a letter when the fire alarm went on last night. I was so
distracted by it that I forgot about the letter until this morning.

There is nothing inherently unique about the referent of the letter, and the speaker
may have both talked to other people about the same or different letters, or have
talked about different letters to the present hearer at other occasions, but “as long as
the previous discourse set shared with the current interlocutor contains only one
individual satisfying the description ..., there will be no referential ambiguity through
non-uniqueness” (Hawkins 1991:408).

• Immediate situation of utterance set - the immediate physical situation of utterance

will constitute another pragmatic set for the purpose of uniqueness, comprising the
elements of the physical context of utterance.
(5) Could you please take the chairs out. (said in a room with a set of chairs)

• Larger situation of utterance set(s) - a number of different size sets, based on

participants’ general background knowledge (community membership knowledge)
could be defined relative to the physical location of the speaker and the hearer.
Thus:
(6) Were you in the bar last night? (said in a Cambridge college Æ the bar in the
‘college set’)
(7) Mary met the Queen last year. (the queen of the relevant country)
(8) He was basking in the sun. (the sun of this solar system)

• Associative sets - a whole range of sets could be formed based on the community
membership knowledge and general knowledge of the world, out of the previous
discourse or situational P-sets:

1
There are inherent problems with the term ‘mutual’ as it suggests the reciprocity of views between
speaker and hearer and leads to the infinite regression problem (see contributors in Smith 1982). We
are using the term here (and believe this is how Hawkins uses it in his paper) to mean that a referent is
manifest, but not necessarily in exactly the same way, to all participants in the conversation.
D. Trenkic, Views and Voices 1 (2002) pp.53-71

(9) I bought a new bike but the tyres were flat. (a bike Æ the tyres)
(10) (said in a college) Who is the new master? (a college Æ the master)

• P-sets formed on-line, from the information provided within the definite expression
itself:
(11) I am not happy with the cover page of my new book.
(12) The books in our library are electronically tagged.
(13) The dog John kicked yesterday bit him.
(14) The fact that Alex organised a party last night did not please Ann.

In the examples above, the cover page is unique relative to the P-set my new
book (my new book has a unique cover page), to which it is explicitly related within
the NP, as well as are the books unique/inclusive relative to the P-set our library. The
dog from the next sentence is unique in the P-set formed on-line in the NP the dog
John kicked yesterday, and the fact that Alex organised a party is a fact unique
relative to all the other facts in the world. What is common to all these examples is
that no previous P-set existed in which any of these referents would be unique, rather,
the P-sets in which their uniqueness holds, respectively, have been established
linguistically within the NPs in which they appeared.
Finally, Hawkins includes the idea of conventional implicature as part of the
non-truth conditional meaning of the, the notion borrowed from Grice (1975).
Implicatures are that part of the meaning of an utterance which is not asserted but is
rather implied. Grice distinguishes between conventional implicatures, which are an
invariant element in the meaning of an expression, and conversational implicatures
that can be cancelled (by an overt denial, for example, or by different beliefs held in
the context). Drawing on this distinction, Hawkins proposes that in addition to its
logical meaning of existence and uniqueness, the is supplemented by a non-truth-
conditional conventional meaning, that of P-membership (conventional implicature)
(1991:414). The signals to the hearer that there is a P-set, mutually manifest to
speaker and hearer on-line, in which the existence and uniqueness of a definite
referent hold. This part of meaning is invariant and not subject to removal or
cancellation. The definite article, however, does not instruct the hearer in which P-set
the referent is to be found. The selection crucially depends on the hearer’s
“fundamental effort after meaning” (Bartlett 1932:227, cited in Brown 1996:17), or in
more modern terms, on his search for ‘relevance’ (Sperber and Wilson 1986). In a
developing discourse, P-sets continuously compete for salience. The referent will be
found in the P-set which is most salient or most relevant in the context. But this part
of meaning is a conversational implicature and may be cancelled:

(15) I bought a book and talked to the author. (Hawkins 1991:428)

While the author will conventionally implicate that there is a P-set in which the
referent exists and is unique, it will only conversationally implicate that the P-set in
which it exists and is unique is the P-set of the mentioned book (thus the author of the
book). This part of the meaning, although strongly implicated, can be cancelled: “I
bought a book and talked to the author about it - not the author of the book, I mean
the author we were just talking about” (Hawkins 1991:429).
In summary of Hawkins’ treatment of the definite article, we could note that
all the elements present in his work have already been raised and discussed in the
earlier literature. The merit of his work is that he brought the different traditions
D. Trenkic, Views and Voices 1 (2002) pp.53-71

together and made them benefit from each other. Perhaps the most important
contribution is that he formalised the intuitively appealing but vague pragmatic notion
of identifiability into ‘mutual manifestness of the existence and uniqueness of a
referent within a P-set’. Identifiability was, at various points, understood to mean
various things, from ‘knowing the identity of’ (holding de re beliefs about the
referent) to having “a shared representation [which] already exists in the speaker’s
and the hearer’s mind at the time of utterance” (Lambrecht 1994:77). Defined in
either way, the notion of identifiability could not account for all the uses of the:
neither is it the case that the identity of the referent has to be known to the hearer, nor
that a shared representation (whatever it be) of it has to exist in the speaker’s and
hearer’s mind at the time of utterance. Looking from the perspective of Hawkins’
account, the speaker assumes that a referent is identifiable to the hearer if the hearer
can accept that the referent exists and is unique in one of the P-sets available to them
on-line. This explanation accounts on what grounds definite expressions can be used
with referents whose de re identity is not known to either the speaker or the hearer, as
in the following example:

(16) We are looking for the vandals who broke into the office yesterday (Lyons
1999:10)

In this case the definite expression the vandals is used because the speaker believes
that the hearer can accept that some maximal set of referents described as vandals
exists and is unique in one of their mutually manifest P-sets (in this case, the P-set of
people who broke into the office the previous day), and that reference is to it.
It has to be said though that even the idea that identifiability should be
accounted for on the basis of uniqueness in the relevant context was not new in
Hawkins’ account. Among others, Grannis (1972) proposed it. Grannis’ account,
however, stopped at relativising the uniqueness to the ‘world of discourse’, or a
‘given conversational situation’ (1972:286). Hawkins contribution is that he carved up
that ‘world of discourse’ into a relatively formalised notion of pragmatically delimited
sets, relative to which the existence and uniqueness of a referent hold.

The indefinite article a/some

In his treatment of the indefinite article, Hawkins includes a(n) and its
plural equivalent some. It must be stressed though that, as a rule, indefinite singular
count nouns do not appear without a(n), whereas indefinite plural and mass noun
phrases most commonly appear bare. Hawkins does not have much to say about bare
plurals or mass nouns. It is important therefore not to assume that what is said for the
indefinite article(s) could be extended to bare plurals (see the discussion in the next
section).
While the was described in positive terms of existence and uniqueness in a P-
set, a(n) resists either positive or negative description in these terms. Consider the
following example:

(17) I met a lion tamer on the street today.

A lion tamer in (17) is neutral with respect to uniqueness (as to how many lion tamers
I met today). The sentence would normally be taken to mean I met one lion tamer
today, but if (17) was continued with I met two lion-tamers, actually, the utterance
would still not be rendered false. As for the existence of the referent in a P-set, a(n)
D. Trenkic, Views and Voices 1 (2002) pp.53-71

does not signal that the referent is not a member of a P-set. If participants in this
exchange went to a circus the previous night, where they had seen a number of lion-
tamers, (17) could be interpreted as referring to one of the lion-tamers from their P-set
(circus). Again the sentence would not be rendered false if the speaker overtly denies
the P-membership: He was nothing like the lion-tamers we saw yesterday.
The indefinite article, thus can both imply uniqueness and non-uniqueness, P-
membership and non-P-membership. Hawkins’ suggestion is that “the variability
becomes highly principled when indefinite interpretations are analysed as
implicatures that result from NOT using the definite article in corresponding
expressions”. The and a therefore provide “a grammatically, and a psychologically
real contrast set, in which the is the logically stronger member of the pair” (Hawkins
1991:417).
The meaning implicatures of a(n) result from Grice’s (1975) maxim of
Quantity, which consists of two parts:

a) Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the present purpose of

the exchange).
b) Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. (Grice 1975:45)

The two parts of the maxim have been re-analysed as Q-principle and I-principle by
Levinson (1987) (cited in Hawkins 1991), and both principles induce certain
conversational implicatures. In short, the Q-principle induces an implicature that
negates a stronger statement - if the speaker could have made a stronger statement, he
would have done so: if he could have used the definite article as the stronger member
of the pair, he would have used it. The I-principle, on the other hand, induces
implicatures of a stronger statement (the maxim of minimisation on the speaker’s part
and of enrichment on the hearer’s part): if the speaker used a(n), because he could not
have used the (due to the non-uniqueness of the referent in a P-set), then a(n) will I-
implicate the P-membership, as long as there is a P-set in which the referent could be
found. These two principles are in an obvious tension, and the resolution to the
tension comes from the fact that Q-implicatures, which are restricted to a small class
of grammatical contrast sets, articles included, are calculated first.
The graphic presentation of this mechanism is shown in Figure 1.:

Could you use the in this context?

(= Is the referent unique in a P-set mutually manifest to S&H on-line?)

yes no => Q-implicature: non-uniqueness

the a(n)

Is there a P-set in which a non-unique

referent could be found?

yes no
=> I-implicature: P-membership
D. Trenkic, Views and Voices 1 (2002) pp.53-71

Figure 1. Graphic representation of Hawkins’ model

If a referent is unique in a P-set mutually manifest to speaker and hearer on-line, then
the speaker should chose the definite noun phrase, as the strongest statement in the
context, to signal it to the hearer. If a(n) is used instead, it Q-implicates non-
uniqueness:

(18) I met a clown on the street today.

A signals that this referent (clown) is not unique in any P-set mutually manifest to
speaker and hearer on-line. If the speaker and the hearer were in the circus the
previous night and saw a clown in it, than a signals that the current referent is not a
member of that P-set (the current referent is not the clown they saw last night), as its
non-uniqueness cannot be realised in it. The first implicature of a(n) is thus non-
uniqueness. Note that non-uniqueness is relative to P-sets mutually manifest to
speaker and hearer on-line (or rather relative to the speaker’s assumptions of what P-
sets are mutually manifest to him and his interlocutor on-line), not to the speaker’s
experience or to the state of affairs in the world.
The Q-implicature, being a conversational implicature, is cancellable:

(19) I met a clown on the street today - in fact it was the same one we saw
yesterday in the circus.

If the non-uniqueness of the referent in P-sets has been established, the next
question is: is there a P-set in which this referent can be non-unique? If there is, then
I-implicature makes this reading more plausible. If after seeing a number of lion-
tamers in the circus show (together with the current hearer), the speaker says:

(20) I met a lion-tamer on the street today.

then it I-implicates that he saw one of the lion-tamers he and the hearer saw in the
circus the previous night - not any random lion-tamer. This implicature is also
cancellable:

(21) I met a lion-tamer on the street today - he was nothing like the lion-tamers we
saw yesterday.

If there is no P-set mutually manifest to speaker and hearer in which the referent
would be non-unique, then a(n) necessarily refers to a referent outside any P-set
mutually manifest to speaker and hearer on-line:

(22) I met a ballerina on the street today.

Hawkins’ elaborate technical explanation of the indefinite article in English,

admittedly does not amount to more than what the previous literature has established
in the sense that the speaker uses an indefinite article when he “believes that his
hearer doesn’t share or wonders whether his hearer shares his information” (Brown
1986:96). Hawkins only formalises the ‘sharing of information’ as having a mutually
manifest P-set in which the referent would exist and be unique. To paraphrase the
above definition, the speaker uses an indefinite article when he believes that his hearer
D. Trenkic, Views and Voices 1 (2002) pp.53-71

does not have a P-set in which the referent would exist and be unique, or if the
speaker wonders if his hearer would have a P-set in which the referent would exists
and be unique.
Again, the merit of Hawkins’ analysis is in the formalising of pragmatic terms
such as ‘identifiability’ and ‘shared information’ into more discrete notion of
‘uniqueness’. The result is that it can account in a systematic way for all the various
interpretations of indefinites, regarding uniqueness, and regarding the P-membership.

Shortcomings of Hawkins’ approach and some possible solutions

Hawkins’ account of the English articles is an account of the overt
articles in English (the, a(n) and some), and as such it represents probably the most
thorough study of their meaning and use. The account, however, has very little to say
about absence of articles, or what some authors call the zero, null or no article (the
terminology is not clear at this point, and what are two articles for some authors (zero
and null), for others are just no article - we accept the latter position, the reasons for
which will become apparent in the discussion that follows). Consequently, it has very
little to say about the interpretation of bare mass and plural nouns, bare count singular
nouns (at school; have lunch; by car) and proper names. Also, Hawkins’ account is an
account of referential uses of the articles, and little is said about non-referential uses
and generics. Some proposal of how to incorporate these issues into the theory
outlined above are presented here.
The point has been repeatedly made in the literature that bare plurals2 in
English are not simply a plural equivalent of indefinite singulars (a NP), and they do
not behave in the same way as plurals with some (cf. Carlson 1977). Additionally, it
has been claimed that bare plurals are grammatically neither definite nor indefinite
(Lyons 1999), just as is the case with bare nominals in languages that do not have the
category of articles. And just as bare nominals in these languages can be interpreted
as having the semantic value of definiteness ranging from minus to plus (depending
on the context), so can English bare plurals: in certain contexts they may have the
interpretation of some (existential indefinite interpretation), in others, the
interpretation of all (which can be either generic interpretation, but also specific,
semantically definite interpretation). Consider the examples:

(23) Dogs are barking outside. (some dogs)

(24) Dogs are friendly animals. (all dogs - generic reading)
(25) Jacques is going to teach French syntax next term. Lectures will be in French.
(all lectures - specific referential reading)

In the last example, the interpretation of the bare plural lectures would not differ from
the interpretation of the potential definite equivalent the lectures, in the given context.
The only difference would be in the truth-conditional meaning - whereas the lectures
would be rendered false if one lecture was not in French, lectures would not. Just as
the generic statement (24) would not be rendered false if there were some dogs in the
world that were not friendly.
A source of explanation of this phenomenon could be found in the work of
Christophersen (1939), and his actualisation theory of the articles. According to this
view, the basic difference in the article system does not lie in the opposition between

2
Whatever is claimed here for bare plurals stands for ‘bare plurals and bare mass nouns’.
D. Trenkic, Views and Voices 1 (2002) pp.53-71

a/some vs. the, but in the opposition between any overt article vs. no article. Both the
definite and the indefinite article ‘actualise a noun’ “from being the name of a mere
idea” (Christophersen 1939:54) into the name of “something viewed as having
precise limits” (ibid:69). A noun preceded by no article thus potentially refers to an
unlimited concept, to the whole class of entities (or mass), without any differentiation
between them. Putting an article in front of a noun “gives this concept form and
presents it as a distinct entity or set of entities” (Chesterman 1991:26). Although both
Christophersen and Chesterman talk about putting ‘precise limits’ and presenting as a
‘distinct entity or set of entities’, note that limits actually do not have to be precise in
any absolute terms, what is more, they are often fuzzy, especially with plural and
mass concepts:

(26) The clouds are hiding the moon. (Burton-Roberts 1981:193)

(27) Some dogs are barking outside.

However, no matter how fuzzy the sets of clouds or dogs in the above examples might
be, the extensivity of both the clouds and some dogs are grammatically (de)limited -
the reference is to some proper subset, whether known or not known to the hearer is
not an issue here, of the whole set. If there is no article, the extensivity of the concept
is not grammatically limited - it has a potential (and only a potential!) to have a scope
over the whole class of entities, as in the example (24) and (25) above. The scope,
however, may be limited by the cotext and the context, as in (23). Table 1 sums up
this discussion:

Table 1. Definite, indefinite and non-definite noun phrases – the case of common nouns
definite indefinite neither definite
nor indefinite
singular ‘the dog’ ‘a dog’ ‘dog’
plural ‘the dogs’ ‘some dogs’ ‘dogs’
extensivity limited limited unlimited
(context-dependent)
identifiability identifiable to H non-identifiable to H context-dependent

The basic distinction then, is between any overt article and no article, and the
distinction may be viewed as the opposition of limited versus unlimited extensivity
(Chesterman 1991). Chesterman’s proposal, however, is to make a distinction
between the zero article (no article in front of plural and mass nouns), and the null
article (no article in front of proper names and singular count nouns) (cf. Jespersen
1949; Quirk et al. 1991), on the grounds that the same form should not have two
diametrically opposite values - indefinite (in the case of bare plurals and mass nouns)
and definite (in the case of proper names, and Chesterman argues, singular count
nouns).
Our belief is that such a distinction is unnecessary. Both the so-called zero
article and the null article are not forms - they are no-forms, they are empty space,
nothing appearing in front of nominals. Being nothing, therefore, they can have any
interpretative (pragmatic) definiteness value (‘identifiability’), depending solely on
the semantics of the nominal, sentential cotext and the context of the situation of
utterance. We have already shown that bare plurals do not necessarily have to have a
semantically indefinite reading (examples 23-25).
Proper names at first sight seem to escape such analysis. They are inherently
semantically definite - as a rule, they refer to individuals, and as a rule, by using a
D. Trenkic, Views and Voices 1 (2002) pp.53-71

proper name, the speaker signals to the hearer that she has means to identify the
referent (if only by name). This is the reason why ‘the empty space’ or ‘no article’ in
front of them is interpreted as having [+Def] semantic value. Grammatically,
however, bare proper names in English are as neutral with respect to definiteness and
indefiniteness as are bare plurals and mass nouns. Unlike the grammatically definite
nominals, proper names do not conventionally implicate that there is a P-set in the
universe of discourse in which the referent would be mutually manifest to speaker and
hearer. Definiteness (‘identifiability’) of the referent of a proper name is merely a
conversational implicature, brought about by our knowledge of ‘regulations’ of how
proper names are used:

(28) I will talk to Marina about it.

=> conversationally implicates that Marina is an individual that exists in one of the P-
sets mutually manifest to speaker and hearer. But this implicature can be cancelled by
the speaker:

(29) I will talk to Marina about it - not the Marina we met in the bar last night, but
a colleague who works in my office.

Unlike Marina, the grammatically definite counterpart the Marina conventionally

implicates that there is a P-set in which this referent exists and is unique. This
implication is not cancellable.
The fact that extensivity of proper names is as a rule limited to one individual
is also a conversational implicature. Proper names can refer to the whole class of
entities satisfying the description:

(30) Shakespeare sells well.

means that any work of Shakespeare sells well.

Just as with any other nominal in English, it is possible to construct contexts in
which a proper name would be used as a grammatically definite or indefinite phrase,
singular or plural. Certain combinations may be more or less statistically improbable,
but they are in principle not impossible:

Table 2. Definite, indefinite and non-definite noun phrases – the case of proper nouns
indefinite definite neither indefinite
nor definite
singular a Marina the Marina Marina
plural some Marinas the Marinas Marinas
extensivity limited limited unlimited
(context-dependent)
identifiability non-identifiable to H identifiable to H context-dependent

The point of this discussion was to argue that the definite, indefinite and no
article (absence of article) are always interpreted in the same way in English, no
matter what ‘class’ of nouns they appear with. In fact, it is accepted here that nouns
do not belong to classes, rather the contexts they appear in do (cf. Yule 1998). It is the
likelihood of a noun appearing in certain contexts that classifies it as proper and
common, or count and noncount.
D. Trenkic, Views and Voices 1 (2002) pp.53-71

The consequence of this view is that English articles and their absence, or
more precisely, the interpretation of nominals appearing with the definite, indefinite
or no articles should be explainable and teachable (to EFL learners) in a systematic
way, not as a list of rules and exceptions as has been done hitherto.
Finally we shall only note that Hawkins’ account does not have much to say
about non-referential or generic uses of articles. An elegant proposal of how generic
readings are derived from the basic meanings of articles can be found in Chesterman
(1991), while Declerck offers an account which demonstrates that the same principles
used to account for referential uses could be applied to non-referential uses:

(31) John is the victim of his own generosity. (Declerck 1986:29)

(32) John is a victim of his own generosity. (Declerck 1986:29)

The first example implies that John is the sole victim (uniqueness criterion) of his
own generosity (P-set), while in the second example it is implied that the property of
‘victim’ is not ‘uniquely determining’ to John.

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