definitecertain

Definitecertain is a theoretical label used in linguistics to describe a hypothetical determiner that encodes both definiteness and epistemic certainty about the referent. The term is not widely standardized and appears in discussions of how definiteness interacts with speaker commitment or evidential stance in noun phrases.

In semantic models, a definitecertain marker would signal that the referent is identifiable to the listener and that the speaker is confident about its identity. It is distinct from a plain definite article and from evidential markers; it may be treated as a separate grammatical feature or as a fused morphosyntactic category. Some analyses treat such meaning as a combination of definiteness and epistemic modality, sometimes linked to discourse deixis or subjectivity.

Cross-linguistically, no widely attested language is known to have a dedicated definitecertain determiner; real-world languages typically encode similar information using combinations of definite articles, demonstratives, evidentials, or mood. The definitecertain concept is instead used as a theoretical construct to explore how definiteness and certainty interact, and to compare them with related phenomena such as evidentiality and epistemic commitment. Hypothetical examples illustrate how a sentence might look if such a determiner existed.

See also: definiteness, definite article, evidentiality, epistemic modality, discourse deixis.