Grammatical Features Inventory: Definiteness

In attempting to understand language, many researchers use features, the elements
into which linguistic units, such as words, can be broken down. Examples of features
are NUMBER (singular, plural, dual, ...), PERSON (1st, 2nd, 3rd), and TENSE (present,
past, ...). Features have proved invaluable for analysis and description, and have a
major role in contemporary linguistics, from the most abstract theorising to the most
applied computational applications. Yet little is firmly established about features:
we have no inventory of which features are found in the world's languages, no agreed
account of how they operate across different components of language, no certainty on
how they interact, and thus no general theory of features. They are used, but are
little discussed and poorly understood. This is a central gap in the conceptual
underpinning of much linguistic investigation.

The Grammatical Features Inventory is an attempt to put the notion of linguistic
'feature' on a sounder empirical and conceptual base. It aims to provide evidence for
the diverse content of features in the world's languages, as well as discuss some of
their formal properties, particularly in morphology (word structure) and syntax
(sentence structure).

The semantic category corresponding the most closely to the central function of grammatical 'definiteness' is identifiability - that is, the expression of whether or not a referent is familiar or already established in the discourse. C. Lyons (1999:278) observes that "[i]n languages where identifiability is represented grammatically, this representation is definiteness; and definiteness is likely to express identifiability prototypically" (note, however, that there may be instances of identifiability, such as generics, which are not treated in a given language as definite; Lyons 1999:278). As with other grammatical categories, it is also to be expected that there are other uses of definiteness which do not relate to identifiability - one of such uses is inclusiveness (a term due to Hawkins 1978), which is particularly appropriate for non-referential uses of definiteness with plural and mass noun phrases. Inclusiveness expresses the fact that the reference is made to the totality of the objects or mass in the context which satisfy the description (C. Lyons 1999:11).

This resource was created for the project 'Grammatical features: A key to
understanding language', funded by the Economic and Social Research Council under
grant number RES-051-27-0122. This support is gratefully acknowledged.