Specificity as Speaker Identifiability

The concept of specificity is often referred to in the linguistic literature. However, the precise definition of the term is unclear. Different researchers argue for different definitions of specificity. The specific / non-specific contrast is sometimes claimed to be semantic in nature, and sometimes, pragmatic. Under the semantics approach, specificity is considered to affect truth conditions of a sentence, and is often essentially treated as scope (Karttunen 1976; Farkas 2002, among others). Under an alternative pragmatic approach (Groenendijk & Stokhof 1980), the crucial component of specificity is identifiability to the speaker. Thus, the referent of a specific NP is identifiable to the speaker, whereas the referent of a non-specific NP is not. In this paper, I argue in favor of the pragmatic approach. I argue that the notion of speaker identifiability is linguistically relevant and should be reflected in an adequate representation of the context. I will bring new evidence in favor of this approach, coming from the interpretational properties of certain lexical items in Russian. I will then propose a formal analysis of specificity which is based on the notion of speaker identifiability.