Interlocutors are typically thought to keep track of information that is shared between speaker and listener (i.e., common ground) and information that is available only to the speaker (i.e., privileged ground). In this study, we investigated whether speakers take their interlocutor’s knowledge into account when choosing between definite articles (e.g., the) and indefinite articles (e.g., a) in...

Employing descriptive approach and qualitative analysis, this paper focuses on comparing Vietnamese generic sentences with English ones in order to look for similarities differences the ways each of languages chooses express meaning their sentences. The comparison indicates that there is no exact equivalence between three types Specifically, both have beginning a [+definite] article; but has si...

Dutch, unlike English, contains two gender-marked forms of the definite article. Does the presence of multiple definite article forms lead Dutch learners to be delayed relative to English learners in the acquisition of their determiner system? Using the Preferential Looking Procedure, we found that Dutch-learning children aged 1 ; 7 to 2 ; 0 use articles during sentence comprehension in a fashi...

The article compares the interpretation of singular topical nominals in Romance (Catalan) and Slavic (Russian), its relation to presence/absence overt morphosyntax. empirical study, presented this paper, confirmed theoretical prediction that Catalan presence a definite conveys uniqueness referent, while an indefinite suggests nonuniqueness. In absence articles (in Russian), bare are compatible ...

The celebrated Zeilberger algorithm which finds holonomic recurrence equations for definite sums of hypergeometric terms F (n, k) is extended to certain nonhypergeometric terms. An expression F (n, k) is called hypergeometric term if both F (n + 1, k)/F (n, k) and F (n, k+1)/F (n, k) are rational functions. Typical examples are ratios of products of exponentials, factorials, Γ function terms, b...

Previous studies have shown that children have difficulty inferring intended referents of definite/indefinite determiners: e.g., that ”Give me the ball” implies a specific ball, while ”Give me a ball” requests any ball from a larger set. Here, we show that these findings need not indicate a fragile capacity for pragmatic reasoning because adults only make such inferences within specific context...