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This article examines the use of subjective and objective nouns and noun phrases in discourse using the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus. It expands upon an earlier study, where I showed that subjective adjectival premodifiers are typically used with the indefinite article in corpus data (e. g. an interesting conclusion), and that further modification (e. g. a very interesting conclusion) results in an even higher likelihood of indefinite marking (Vartiainen 2013, Subjectivity, indefiniteness and semantic change. English Language and Linguistics 17(1). 157–179). In this paper, I focus on three research questions: (i) does the correlation between subjective meaning and indefinite marking also obtain when demonstrative and possessive determiners are included in the data, (ii) does the correlation depend on adjectival modification, or are subjective nouns also used more often in indefinite structures, (iii) are there qualitative differences (in terms of syntactic roles) between the use of indefinite subjective and objective NPs?
