Nouns and Noun Phrases - University of Macau Library

Determiners: articles and pronouns 685
Similarly, the noun phrase in (17b) presupposes that there is only a single book that
is part of domain D, and it is predicated of this book that it was sent yesterday.
When the noun phrase is plural, it does not refer to a single entity but to a set.
Again, it is presupposed that the listener is able to uniquely identify this set. When
the speaker utters a sentence like (18a), he presupposes that the listener knows that
he is referring to, for instance, his own two cats and the three cats of his friend
Mary. Something similar holds for (18b).
(18) a. De katten zijn ziek.
the cats are ill
b. De boeken zijn gisteren verzonden.
the books have been yesterday sent
The discussion above amounts to saying that the use of a definite article implies that
set A in Figure 1 does not include all entities that satisfy the description of the NP,
but only those entities that are part of domain D: the referent of the noun phrase is
assumed to be identifiable for both the speaker and the addressee. In this sense
definite noun phrases are typically linked to the discourse (°D-linked). The same
thing holds for definite noun phrases headed by a non-count noun as in De wijn
staat in de keuken ‘The wine is in the kitchen’; cf. the discussion below (7).
II. Indefinite noun phrases
The indefinite articles een ‘a’ and ∅ lack the implication usually found with definite
articles that the entities in set A are part of domain D, and hence known to both the
speaker and the user. On the contrary, indefinite noun phrases are often used to
introduce a new entity into domain D in so-called PRESENTATIVE clauses (clauses
that introduce a new entity into domain D). Presentative clauses in which the
indefinite noun phrase functions as the subject typically take the form of an
°expletive construction like (19a). When the indefinite noun phrase has some other
function in the clause, as in (19b), presentative clauses are not formally marked.
(19) • Presentative clauses
a. Er ligt een lijk in de tuin.
there lies a corpse in the garden
‘There is a corpse is lying in the garden.’
b. Ik vond gisteren een lijk in mijn tuin.
I found yesterday a corpse in my garden
‘Yesterday, I found a corpse in my garden.’
The examples in (19) introduce a new entity into domain D, which is therefore not
known to the addressee by definition. However, indefinite noun phrases can also be
used when the referent could in principle be uniquely identified by the hearer, but
the speaker does not want to be too specific, for instance, because that would not be
relevant in the given context. An example like this is given in (20): this example is
felicitous even if the speaker could have been more specific by referring to the book
in question as Jackendoff’s Semantic Structures; see Section 5.1.1.3 for further
discussion.