Specificity (linguistics)
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In linguistics, specificity is a semantic feature of noun phrases, distinguishing between entities/nouns/referents that are unique in a given context and those which are not, even if the unique referent isn't identifiable.
This is distinct from the feature of definiteness.
- I'm looking for the manager, Ms Lee. [definite, specific]
- I'm looking for the manager, whoever that may be. [definite, non-specific]
- There's a certain word that I can never remember. [indefinite, specific]
- Think of a word, any word. [indefinite, non-specific]
In English and many other languages, specificity is not typically marked. As a result, sometimes, specificity can be ambiguous. Consider the following example:
- Every woman talked to a child in fifth grade.
This has two interpretations. Under one reading, every woman talked to the same child (the class president, for example), and here the noun phrase a child in fifth grade is specific. Under the second reading, various children were talked to. In this case, a child in fifth grade is non-specific.[1] (Under the additional reading that every woman, when she was in fifth grade, talked to a child, "a child" is also non-specific; in this case the ambiguity of specificity is removed by the resolution of the syntactic ambiguity in the larger sentence.)
"In contrast, in some languages, NPs in certain positions are always unambiguous with respect to specificity. The ambiguity is resolved through case marking: NPs with overt case morphology are specific, NPs without case morphology are nonspecific."[2]