Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

3.4 The Definiteness Effect
Since the only way of proving that a bare noun, particularly a bare noun that acts as the
head of a relative clause, is indefinite is through the identification of a definiteness effect,
this section describes the prototypical case of a definiteness effect in English (the
existential “there” sentence) and highlights several other related definiteness effects
which occur in both English and, as I argue here, Sumerian.
The first extensive study of the phenomenon was by Milsark (1974), in which he
begins with a series of sentences in English:
(41) a. There is a Santa Claus.
b. There might be a duck in the sink.
c. There has been a man shot by a maniac.
d. There were at least fifty people sick.
Milsark (1974; 1977) sought to characterize the noun that immediately follows the copula
in (41a) through (41d) and argued that a number of distinct morphosyntactic and
semantic restrictions apply to the noun in question as well as any deverbal modifiers such
as “shot” in (41c). Milsark noted that definite nouns do not, as a rule, occur in this
position (hence the name of the constraint), but that if the post-copular noun is affected
by a co-occurring focus construction, then a definite noun could occur, but only in a
rather particular interpretation known as a “pair-list” reading (see below for
exemplification). Milsark also noted that what are known as individual-level predicates,
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