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In the remainder of this introductory part, I present the outline of this book. Chapter 2 reviews research on the discourse properties of different types of referring expressions, which will be important for the investigation of the indefinite noun phrases discussed in Chapters 3-5. The accounts presented in this Chapter differ in many respects, but one of their common denominators is the notion of accessibility. The proponents of the first account I discuss analyse accessibility in terms of attention or cognitive activation (Chafe 1975, Ariel 1988 and Gundel et al. 1993), while the second account to accessibility investigates it in terms of topicality (Givón 1983, Grosz, Joshi and Scott 1995, Walker, Joshi and Prince 1998). In this book, I will adopt an expectancy-driven view to accessibility (Arnold 1998, 2010, Kehler, Kertz, Rohde and Elman 2008), as this model distinguishes between two types of expectancies: (i) expectancies with respect to the referent that will be mentioned next and (ii) expectancies with respect to the type of referring expression used for a particular referent. Most crucial for the present investigation is the fact that an expectancy-driven account allows for an analysis of the referents of indefinite noun phrases in terms of discourse structuring devices.

Despite the fact that most of the above accounts focus on pronoun resolution (i.e. on the factors that license the use of a pronoun), I summarize those parts of their accounts, which deal with the import of indefinite noun phrases in structuring the following discourse. By the end of Chapter 2, I will propose two textual characteristics to measure the discourse structuring potential of indefinite noun phrases, namely (i) referential persistence, and (ii) topic shift potential. These factors will be used in the story-continuation investigations presented in the following three Chapters to test the discourse structuring potential of indefinite this in English, German indefinite so’n and Romanian pe.

In Chapter 3 I argue for an analysis of indefinite this in English as indicating the speaker’s referential intention to introduce a discourse prominent referent in the following text. First, in line with other findings (Prince 1981, Ionin 2006), I confirm the preference of indefinite this for particular referential readings. Second, the experimental results reported in this Chapter indicate that indefinite this functions as a discourse-structuring device. This function is reflected by the high referential persistence and by the topic shift potential of the referents marked in this way compared to their simple indefinite counterparts.

In Chapter 4 I investigate the behaviour of indefinite noun phrases headed by the indefinite determiner so’n. I show that so’n indefinites display a strong preference for referential readings, as rigid reference and epistemic specificity. This theoretical consideration receives further support from a web-based sentence interpretation task (Experiment 1), which shows that indefinite noun phrases headed by so’n tend to presuppose the existence of their associated referents in contexts that contain intensional operators and negation. Furthermore, indefinites headed by so’n introduce referents with particular discourse-pragmatic properties that become visible in contexts that do not contain operators at sentence level. In light of the findings of a sentence-continuation study (Experiment 2), I conclude that referents headed by so’n show effects upon the subsequent discourse similar to English indefinite this. Such referents are referentially highly continuous and more prone to shift the topic in a subsequent matrix clause.

Chapter 5 is centred on the distribution of pe-marking with indefinite noun phrases as an instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Romanian. I show that pe-marking with indefinite noun phrases cannot be thoroughly accounted for, unless the broader discourse contexts in which such noun phrases are used is investigated. More precisely, contrary to previous approaches on DOM in Romanian (e.g. Dobrovie-Sorin 1994), I argue that (referential, scopal or epistemic) specificity is not sufficient to account for the distribution of the pe-marker in the domain of indefinite noun phrases and that pe-marked direct objects are also sensitive to the discourse context they appear in, changing the discourse properties of their referents. Based on the findings of an off-line story-continuation experiment, I show that pe-marked referents are devices for structuring the discourse, being interpreted by hearers as signals of high referential continuity. At the same time, pe-marked referents are more prone to shift the topic of the discourse. These findings receive further support from the analysis of definite unmodified noun phrases in direct object position that are characterized along the same lines, as discourse structuring devices.

Chapter 6 reviews the theoretical observations and the experimental evidence described in this book, which pointed out that different types of indefinite noun phrases give structure to the subsequent discourse in different ways. First, I will argue that the indefinite noun phrases discussed here achieve stability of reference (Farkas and Brasoveanu 2010) via prominence at the discourse level in terms of discourse structuring potential. Discourse prominence prevents these noun phrases to scope under certain operators. Thus, the indefinite noun phrases show a preference for particular referential interpretations because they are discourse prominent, and not vice versa. Second, I will discuss possible reasons for why languages use different devices to mark referents that will play a preferential role within a discourse. This proposal will build on several investigations on the grammaticalization path of the indefinite article cross-linguistically (Heine 1997, Givón 1981, Stark 2002).

The final Chapter sums up the main conclusions and discusses discourse theories against the findings brought to light in the more empirical Chapters. It is argued that any approach concerned with the status of a referent in the discourse has to distinguish between (at least) two properties of this referent, namely its (local) accessibility or prominence status and its discourse structuring potential. This Chapter also discusses some loose ends that suggest directions for further work.