ABSTRACT
When applied to EA, however, the hearer-new analysis is not without problems, as it erroneously rules out certain types of felicitous existential sentences where the quantified indefinite NP denotes a referent assumed to be well known to the addressee. One such type is existentials with unidentified hearer-old referents presented as members of hearer-old sets, as in (3a) and (3b). In these sentences, it is taken for granted that the addressee knows the referent of the existential NP (her child or relative) as well as the set of concerned children or relatives. These
existential sentences do not add new referents to the addressee’s model of the world, yet they are acceptable. Interestingly, the addressee, and possibly the speaker, does not know which child or relative is referred to, yet the NP is considered hearer-old, since old information is defined in terms of existing knowledge rather than the ability to identify referents (Prince 1992; Ward and Birner 1995; Birner and Ward 1998).
