6.5. The Greek article and Information Status Taxonomy
My analysis of the Greek use of the article can be diagrammed in the form of a grid,
with one axis related to salience, and the other related to information status. The box
Hearer-new/nonsalient is blank, as Hearer-new information is by definition salient:
Salient Nonsalient
Hearer-new −article
Hearer-old −article +article
So lack of the article in Greek marks salience, and must be used for Hearer-new
entities of the category 1 NEW. In contrast, use of the article marks Hearer-old information,
and occurs with every category except 1 NEW, unless the Hearer-old entity is
being explicitly marked as salient. These Hearer-old categories can be thought of as
“known, particular” where “known” means “expected by the speaker to be in the hearer’s
short or long-term memory”, and “particular” means that the speaker expects the hearer
to be able to identity which referent out of the potentially enormous number of
possibilities is being referred to.
Richard A. Hoyle, Scenarios, discourse and translation. SIL 2008
http://www.sil.org/silepubs/Pubs/50670/ ... lation.pdf