摘要：The definiteness restriction or definiteness effect (DE) is one of the cross-linguistic variations, influencing the syntactic distribution of definites and indefinites. Generally speaking, sensitivity to definite determiner phrases (DPs) where definites are favored over indefinites is called definiteness effect and such an effect has been observed in a number of constructions (Abbott, 2006b).This study tries to take a look at the major lines of research with respect to the notion of definiteness and its effect (DE) in different languages as well as L2 studies which have focused on DE in second language acquisition. The paper raises a number of questions the investigation of which might shed some further light on the nature of L2 implicit knowledge and/or L2 linguistic processing.
关键词：definiteness; definiteness effect (DE); second language
