Definiteness and Indefiniteness

March 10, 2010

Definiteness and Indefiniteness

Russian, as we know, has no articles. Indeed, words like ‘a, an, the’ prove to be the most difficult for L2 learners of English to master. ‘I read book,’ says the learner. But in English an entity has to be categorized by how much the speaker and his listeners know about it. If a Russian has been telling you that he’s reading a book in English, and you see him the next day and he says “I read book,” you can reconstruct ‘I am reading the/that book (I told you about)’ out of the sentence. But without context we are helpless. So what book?

When we use ‘the’, or proper names, we assume some past context. “Old man Fisher came.” “The cat got in the fishbowl.” “Want to go to Couter’s tonight?”

When we use ‘a’ we are introducing a new entity into the conversation that hasn’t been identified or given any context. “There is a strange man in the waiting room.” “Did you run through a red light on the way home tonight?” In the former sentence, ‘there is’ is a way of signalling the introduction of a new, specific-indefinite entity. In the second, the question signals that the noun phrase ‘a red light’ is indefinite but non-specific. We want to know whether any red light was encountered. “Did you know that you ran a red light tonight?” Here the speaker is informing his interlocutor about a specific entity that he wants to mention.

Now, what about Russian? Names, as in English, are definite, and are treated as such. — Приходила Ирина. ‘Irina was here.’ (Note the I verb, hinting that she came and subsequently left.) — Не хочешь к Старой лошади сегодня вечером? ‘Don’t you want to go to the Old Horse [a bar] tonight?’

But what about common nouns, nouns that are not proper names? Here the flexible word order and distinctive intonation of Russian both play big roles. The new information, or the rheme, usually comes at sentence-end; so also, do indefinites.
— В комнате стоит незнакомый человек. — Незнакомый человек стоит в комнате.
‘A strange man is in the room.’

— Кто читает? — Читает Маша. ‘Who is reading? Masha is reading.’ In this sentence we see that a definite can also be in the final position of the rheme or new information. So also Вчера на улице я видел вашу сестру. ‘I saw your sister on the street yesterday.’

So context is all-important for identifying an indefinite. Читая Достоевского, я входил в новый, чудесный, совершенно незнакомый мне душевный мир. ‘As I read Dostoevsky, I entered a new, miraculous new world that had been completely unknown to me.’

Gogol played with definiteness as he did with all grammatical categories. Look at the beginning of Шинель, The Overcoat. В департаменте...но нельзя сказать, в каком департменте. Ничего нет сердитого всякого рода департаментов... Итак, департамент, о котором идет дело, мы назовем одним департаментом. Итак... в одном департаменте служил один чиновник.

‘In a department...but I can’t say in what department. No one is more easily angered than departments of all sorts... So, the department in which our business is taking place, we will call “a certain department.” So... in a certain department there worked a certain civil servant.’

‘Certain’, and Russian один, may mark a specific indefinite that the speaker knows something — perhaps a great deal — about. Not in every case does English ‘certain’ answer Russian один.
— У него в поведении какая–то угловатость, нескладность. ‘In his behavior there is a certain angularity, a stiff unjointedness.’ The indefinite какой–то marks a specific indefinite which the speaker can’t yet define more closely.

The indefinite какой–нибудь, on the other hand, is for an entity which is probably non–specific. This we see in questions, as in у вас есть какие–нибудь вопросы, ‘do you have any questions?’

Next time: how the authors of Начало (correctly! for a change) explain the definiteness/indefiniteness of the object of ждать ‘wait for’.
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