A commonly held view of English definite articles is that they signal that the referent of an NP is familiar to the addressee. However, it is well known that not all definite article phrases meet this familiarity requirement. In this paper we argue that the Givenness Hierarchy framework provides an insightful account of all uses of definite article phrases without requiring an appeal to accommodation. Such an account provides a unified treatment of definite article phrases, including demonstrative phrases and personal pronouns, while at the same time distinguishing among them in a principled way. This proposal is supported by results of a corpus-based examination of the use of definite articles and by an examination of cleft presuppositions.
Gundel, Jeanette K., Nancy Hedberg and Ron Zacharski. 2001. “Cognitive Status and Definite Descriptions in English: Why Accommodation is Unnecessary.” English Language and Linguistics 5. 273-295. (pdf)