English Definite Article''the '' in Term of Definiteness With Reference to Literary Works:A Linguistic Study

	English Definite Article''the '' in Term of Definiteness With Reference to Literary Works:A Linguistic Study
journal of kerbala university
Article 1, Volume 7, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 1-17 PDF (0 K)
Abstract
This paper is an attempt to investigate the concept of definiteness which is of special interest because it seems to be discourse - pragmatic in nature but it has semantic impact. In English, definiteness is syntactically encoded by the definite article ''the''. The definite article can be discussed on different perspectives: syntactic, semantic, discourse- pragmatic, and cognitive. Much of the research into the meaning of the definite article'' the'' can be clustered under two main headings: theories that analyze the article in terms of unique identifiability and those that analyze ''the'' in terms of familiarity. This paper aims at showing that referential theories provide only partial accounts of the meaning and distribution of the article. In addition to its referential function, the definite article has another function, including notions such as: topic–comment, new–given information, presupposition – focus, prominence, and viewpoint. Focusing principally on the definite article, the paper investigates that literary works may be used to indicate certain entities that have not been mentioned beforehand in the texts. For this reason, evidences drawn from different literary texts have been analyzed depending on discourse-pragmatic and cognitive frameworks which are important for understanding the many subtle shades of meaning conveyed by the definite article.

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