Lexical factors in English definiteness marking: a corpus-based investigation
Perek F, Sommerer L (2025)
Publication Language: English
Publication Type: Journal article
Publication year: 2025
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Abstract
Using data from the British National Corpus, this paper examines the correlation between particular nouns and verbs and the definiteness of direct objects. We find that many nouns, and even more verbs, strongly prefer either definite or indefinite direct objects. Using distributional semantics, we show that these preferences correlate with the meaning of those lexical items, in that semantically similar items tend to show similar preferences. These findings allow us to reexamine to what extent definiteness marking is primarily driven by discourse-pragmatic considerations, as is traditionally considered to be the case. We argue that lexical factors play a role in definiteness marking, and following a usage-based approach to grammatical representation, we suggest that speakers may store information about the typical definiteness status of noun phrases with their mental representation of lexical items, in particular the argument structure of verbs.
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APA:
Perek, F., & Sommerer, L. (2025). Lexical factors in English definiteness marking: a corpus-based investigation. Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2024-0032
MLA:
Perek, Florent, and Lotte Sommerer. "Lexical factors in English definiteness marking: a corpus-based investigation." Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory (2025).
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