Abstract

Definiteness is a quasi-universal phenomenon of linguistic usage, a by-product of the mental activity of naming, of finding names for experiential items that are perceived, remembered or imagined. In languages that have no articles, it may be expressed by random definers, or even by functional sentence position in Slavic (Krámský 1972) and in non-Indo-European languages such as Finnish (Chesterman 1991). The…