Re: "the"

Muke wrote:

>>From:    Matt Pearson <jmpearson@...>
>>
>>Perhaps "the X" in this case means "the individual out of some
>>(perhaps unspecified) set of individuals who is identified or
>>identifiable by virtue of being an X".  This seems like a natural
>>metaphorical extension of the normal meaning of "the" from
>>ordinary definite descriptions to epithets.
>
>Sounds kind of like Jadúno's "titular article" (dunno what the regular term
>might be, I made that one up) 'ja'.  I can't really call it a definite
>article, as it isn't used to refer to old/definite information (I saw a dog.
>The dog was ugly as muck.)
>
>The use is more where definiteness is assumed.  Matt there, talking about
>himself, is definite and can use 'the' without introduction.  I think it's the
>same 'the' as in "The Lord is my shepherd" and "I'm on the World Wide Web"--at
>least, in Jadúno it is.
It's because of examples like these that I think of definiteness as
crucially involving *identifiability*:  A noun phrase is marked as
definite if it refers to an entity which is uniquely identifiable--
either because its referent has been established in the discourse
(as in your dog example), or because it is present in the discourse
environment (as in "the book over there"), or because it refers to
a unique, one-of-a-kind entity in the world ("the Lord", "the WWW",
"the White House", cf. also superlatives such as "the highest mountain
in the world"), or because sufficient information is given in the noun
phrase itself to make the entity identifiable on the basis of prior
knowledge about the world (e.g. "the house where John lives" is
identifiable if both the speaker and the hearer know who John is).

Your "titular article" appears to specify that the referent is not only
uniquely identifiable, but is in fact unique, a one-of-a-kind entity.

Matt.