ИСТИНА

The article is concerned with the cognitive process of pragmatic inferencing viewed as connecting prior knowledge to text/context-based information and focuses on the linguistic means of its representation in English. The role of inferencing in communication is shown through the use of article forms of nouns, such as zero-, a(n)-, and the-forms that help to arrive at the right interpretation of the speaker’s intended meaning. Special emphasis is placed on the considerable challenges the-forms of nouns present to the Russian learners of English, in particular, the differences between indirect anaphoric reference and situationally bound reference.