Number-based effects on the goodness of English ‘the’

Abstract

The ability to uniquely identify the intended referent in a given context is often considered a categorical factor licensing English 'the.' However, Reed (2016, 2020) compiles a wide range of non-unique uses of the definite article and suggests that uniqueness is just one among several contextual factors that plays a role. In particular, she suggests `'the' may be used even when the lexical content does not disambiguate in favor of a uniquely identifiable referent, as long as sufficient information about it has otherwise been provided in the context of the discourse. In this study, we measure how natural English speakers find occurrences of `the within contexts that vary in informational sufficiency, which we operationalize by way of two contextual factors: (i) the number of potential referents (relatively few vs. many), and (ii) hearer-relevancy (statement vs. request). Results suggest that our experimental participants were robustly sensitive to these contextual manipulations of sufficiency in rating the naturalness of `'the,' in line with Reed's suggestion.