DISCOURSE FUNCTIONS OF DEFINITE AND INDEFINITE NOMINAL GROUPS
The semantic function of the articles is to present the referents of NG heads as definite, indefinite or generic.
The first two meanings are basically discourse functions, associated with the information packaging of the content of a clause, sentence or extended discourse into Given and New information; that is, what is taken by the speaker as known to the hearer, and what is taken as not known. Such is the case in the following short news item from The Times. With the indefinite article, the referent is marked as unknown to the reader and is being introduced for the first time. Once introduced, the referent can be referred to by the definite article the or by a pronoun (he, in this case) and identified by a proper name.
An amateur yachtsman has spent four days fearing that he was in the middle of the North Sea, unaware that he was 100 yards from shore. Allan McKeand, a retired industrial chemist from Skipton, North Yorkshire, ran into fog off the North East coastal town of Redcar on Monday.
Quite commonly in fiction a writer introduces a new referent at the beginning of a story as if it were already known. This happens in the novel Watership Down, where the first sentence is ‘The primroses were over’. The use of the definite article here perspectivizes the story from a particular viewpoint: that of the rabbits, the protagonists of the story, as readers soon discover.
