identifiedness

— Viewed syntagmatically, article-introduced nominal clusters have been judged either to refer to an already mentioned or to an already known referent or not so to refer. If they do so refer, such reference is either anaphoric or deictic, and it signals identifiedness. Bloomfield seems to equate definiteness with identifiedness. And Paul Christophersen implies that identifiedness is one component of familiarity, familiarity being the distinctive meaning he assigns to the definite article the, […]