Formal Aspects of a Pragmatic Theory of Definiteness

The concept of definiteness in natural language is of particular interest because it is pragmatic in its nature but it also has an important semantic impact. Therefore, every semantic theory has to deal with the problem of definiteness for two reasons. Firstly, definite expressions are necessary to fix the reference and to determine the truth condition of an utterance. And secondly, the analysis of definiteness helps us to understand more about the (vague) borderline between pragmatics and semantics and their interaction. The present paper traces definiteness back to the pragmatic principle of salience according to which an expression is definite if it refers to a salient object. Several different factors play a role in establishing a certain salience or salience hierarchy. This paper is not concerned with those factors but it gives a formal representation of expressions that depend on such salience hierarchies. Salience is reconstructed by the formal tool of context dependent choice functions, that assign one of its elements to each non-empty sets. In this way the pragmatic concept of definiteness gets its semantic adequate place.