In linguistics, givenness is the degree to which a speaker assumes certain contextual information of a topic of discourse is already known to the listener. The speaker thus considers it unnecessary to provide further contextual information through an expression's linguistic properties (e.g. its syntactic form or position, or its patterns of stress and intonation). A given contextual information in a discourse is assumed to be known by the addressee in the moment of utterance, therefore a given expression must be known from prior discourse.

Givenness is marked by the absence of emphasis or detailed explanations. For example, when informing a close friend of having taken a long-considered action, one might simply say "I did it!" The givenness of the action which "it" refers to results from previously discussing the action. In that utterance, the stress would not fall on "it," but on "did." This example may be contrasted when the nature of the action is new information, such as "I did a cartwheel!" In this case, the object of did— the noun cartwheel— will receive the emphasis.

In literature, Prince (1981) distinguishes between three different kinds of Givenness:

Definition by Krifka (2008):

A feature X of an expression α is a Givenness feature if X indicates whether the denotation of α is present in the CG [(Common Ground)] (see below) or not, and/or indicates the degree to which it is present in the immediate CG.

This definition allows two different interpretations of givenness: givenness may be either a categorical feature (given vs. not given), or a scale that expresses the degree of discourse salience.

Definition by Kratzer and Selkirk (2018):

An expression α is Given in a context C if there is a discourse referent (individual, property, proposition) in C that entails [[α]] O, C.