Definiteness and Indefiniteness: A Study in Reference and Grammaticality Prediction

First published in 1988, this book is concerned with the definite and indefinite articles in English. It provides an integrated pragmatic-semantic theory of definite and indefinite reference, on the basis of which, many co-occurance restrictions between articles and non-modifiers are explained.

At the general theoretical level, this book looks at the role of semantics in the prediction of all and only the grammatical sentences of a language. A generalisation is proposed uniting semantic opp...