Declarative Memory: Evidence From Patients With Hippocampal Amnesia

Consider the following utterances: (a) “Hey Dan, did you buy this [pointing to a cap] at the game?” (b) “Hey Dan, did you buy this [pointing to a cap] at a game?” Both of these sentences display the three basic types of defi-nite references—the proper noun Dan, the deictic referent this (pointing to a cap that both the speaker and the listener can see), and anaphora (you and the game). The sentences differ linguistically only in their use of two small words: the and a, but this difference confers a critical difference in meaning. The use in (a) of the definite article (the game), unlike the use in (b) of an indefinite article (a game), indicates that the speaker has in mind a particular referent that he or she believes the listener can uniquely identify from among other possibili