Givenness

This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. Please help improve it to make it understandable to non-experts, without removing the technical details. (February 2019) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

In linguistics, givenness is a phenomenon in which a speaker assumes that contextual information of a topic of discourse is already known to the listener. The speaker thus considers it unnecessary to supply further contextual information through an expression's linguistic properties, its syntactic form or position, or its patterns of stress and intonation.^[1] Givenness involves contextual information in a discourse that is given, or assumed to be known, by the addressee in the moment of utterance. Therefore, a given expression must be known from prior discourse.^[2]

Givenness is marked by the absence of emphasis or detailed explanations. For example, when informing a close friend of having taken a long-considered action, an English speaker might simply say, "I did it!" The givenness of the action which "it" refers to results from previously discussing the action. In that utterance, the stress would not fall on "it," but on "did." This example may be contrasted when the nature of the action is new information, such as "I did a cartwheel!" In this case, the object of did— the noun cartwheel— will receive the emphasis.