The Indefinite Article as Discourse Displacement Marker: Grammatical Parsability, Ground State Return, and the Evasion of Commitment

We apply the displacement framework to the English article system, formalizing the indefinite article a/an as a discourse displacement marker introducing entities not in shared ground state S0_disc, and the definite article the as a return signal. We derive parsability applications, explain the phonological allomorphy rule, trace the numeral etymology, and formalize the institutional corruption move of a/an before unverifiable abstract nouns.