Definiteness
Definiteness is a morphological category with a language-dependent marking, which in English and other European languages is typically indicated by the use of a definite article or nominal suffix, such as "the book" in English and "bogen" in Danish. Other expressions that are considered to be definite include NPs with a demonstrative pronoun ("those shoes"), or a 'universal' determiner ("every man"), and singular NPs with a possessive pronoun ("my house") or a genitive construction {"Mary's dog"). Proper names and personal pronouns are also counted as definite. See Abbott (2004) and Zwarts (1994) for overviews, and Lyons (1999) and Abbott (2010; 2017) for analyses of issues relating to definiteness and referring expressions.
In the literature, definiteness if often considered to be a semantic and/or pragmatic property of noun phrases: a definite expression refers to a specific determinate entity or set of entities; an indefinite description refers to any entity or set of entities that satisfies the description. In other words, a definite expression is determinate, and definiteness is the grammatical expression of determinacy.
The relation between definiteness and determinacy is by no means straightforward, however. Examples of definite expressions which are indeterminate, are the following:
For references see the bibliography part of this site.