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This book is concerned with the use of a particular class of indefinite noun phrases in English, German and Romanian. In a plain context, speakers of the aforementioned languages could use, seemingly interchangeably, two types of indefinite noun phrases to refer to the same referent. In each of the three languages, one indefinite noun phrase form is headed by a special marker (i.e. indefinite this in English, so’n in German and pe-marking in Romanian), whereas the other form remains unmarked (i.e. it is headed by the simple indefinite determiner a/an). While the propositional contribution of the two types of indefinite noun phrases seems to be the same, the two types of indefinite expressions differ with respect to their contribution at the discourse level in terms of the expectations they give rise to. A question that arises at this point is, on what grounds do speakers choose one type of referring expression over the other, so that their hearers can successfully identify the referent in question and generate expectations with respect to the subsequent discourse?

The three markers central to the present analysis, namely English indefinite this, German indefinite so’n and pe-marking in Romanian are used to introduce new referents in the discourse. Moreover, their sentence semantic contribution can be partly explained by appealing to their particular referential properties. In Chapters 3-5, I will discuss in turn the referential behaviour of each of the three types of indefinite noun phrases in sentences containing operators and in plain and transparent sentences and show that while they display an affinity for referential readings, this correlation is imperfect. In other words, while all three types of indefinite noun phrases tend to bear specific readings (compared to their simple indefinite counterparts), we still find sentences in which the indefinite noun phrases bare non-specific readings. Thus, the use of these indefinite noun phrases cannot be (solely) accounted for in terms of their sentence-level contribution and it seems that they impact larger discourse units. An analysis of the noun phrases headed by English indefinite this, German so’n and pe-marking in Romanian in terms of their discourse contribution may seem straightforward, but it simultaneously raises several questions, which I aim to answer in the remainder of this Chapter. First, it is important to note that the centrepieces of previous studies have been, with some exceptions, definite noun phrases, while the analysis of indefinite noun phrases has been often left unaddressed. The latter are either considered not to be referential expressions at all, or not to contribute in a significant way to the overall discourse structure. Thus, the first question that arises is, what the discourse contribution of indefinite noun phrases in general is and how it can be tested? More specifically, what are the textual characteristics that indicate their function at the discourse level? Second, most accounts investigating the contribution of different types of referring expressions limit their analyse to short discourse segments, consisting of two adjacent sentences. Another question that arises is, whether the impact of indefinite noun phrases can be observed within larger discours units, consisting of more than two adjacent matrix sentences? And finally, a more general question is, whether the observed effects can be traced back to accessibility or prominence alone, or whether we need to identify other mechanisms to account for the observed effects?

This Chapter is structured as follows: In the first Section, I discuss semantic-pragmatic accounts on definite and indefinite noun phrases, which provide an explanation for the use of a particular type of referring expression on the basis of their contribution at sentence level. The next Sections are dedicated to several approaches that motivate the use of different types of referring expressions in terms of the accessibility of their associated referents. First, in Section 2.2.1 I discuss accessibility in terms of cognitive activation (Ariel 1988, 1990), which considers that referents are ranked according to their activation level in the minds of the conversation participants. A particular degree of activation licenses the use of a type of referring expression over another. The more activated a referent is, the less explicit the type of referring expression used to refer to it will be. And conversely, the less activated a referent is, the more lexical material is needed to refer back to it. In Section 2.3, I then introduce an alternative model of accessibility in terms of topicality (Givón 1981, 1983, Grosz, Joshi and Scott 1995; Walker, Joshi and Prince1998, among others), which integrates some of the semantic-pragmatic factors discussed in the previous Section in a more complex model of referential management. Another line of research showed that several semantic-pragmatic factors determine the proper use and interpretation of a given type of referring expression. In Section 2.3.3 I discuss five of these factors that have been shown to contribute to the accessibility or prominence of referents, namely recency, givenness, syntactic prominence, semantic prominence, implicit causality and coherence relations. Section 2.4 focuses on the view of accessibility in terms of expectancy (Arnold 2001). According to this approach, an accessible referent is one that is expected in terms of likelihood of subsequent mention. The three special indefinite markers (i.e. indefinite this, so’n and pe) will be analysed in terms of the expectancies they trigger on comprehenders’ side. In Section 2.4.1 I introduce the analysis method that will be used in the Chapters to follow to determine the discourse structuring potential of the indefinites headed by this, so’n and pe. The last Section concludes the present Chapter.