Context Dependence and Procedural Meaning: The Semantics of Definites

This thesis argues that there is a theoretically interesting connection between members of the intuitive category of context-dependent expressions, including "we", "tall", "local", "every man", "the woman", "it", "those donkeys" and so on. A treatment of the linguistic meaning of these expressions will be proposed based on the idea that their use raises issues for the audience about the proper understanding of the utterances in which they occur. The proposal will be developed in terms of a semantics for questions, which draws on the idea that to know the meaning of a question is to know what would count as an answer. It can be summarised along similar lines: to know the meaning of a context-dependent expression is to know what properties or relations (of the appropriate type) it could be used to express. The framework in which this idea will be developed can account for why the expressions that are given this issue-based treatment can also be given dependent, bound readings. The class of definite expressions, including descriptions and pronouns, is analysed in detail. A quantificational approach, where the determiner is existential, is assumed for all forms of definiteness. In all cases, the restrictor is interpreted by an atomic definite concept. The audience's grasp of the properties which definite concepts express is the result of inferential processes which take the linguistic meaning of a definite expression as input. These processes are constrained by pragmatic principles. The analysis of context-dependent expressions is extended to account for dependent interpretations. A treatment of donkey sentences that accounts for their variable quantificational force is shown to follow naturally from the analysis. A pragmatic account of infelicitous uses of definites is provided and shown to compare favourably with that provided by dynamic semantic theories. Also, a novel treatment of plural definites is provided which accounts for their variable quantificational force

Predicting definite and indefinite referents during discourse comprehension: Evidence from event‐related potentials

Linguistic predictions may be generated from and evaluated against a representation of events and referents described in the discourse. Compatible with this idea, recent work shows that predictions about novel noun phrases include their definiteness. In the current follow-up study, we ask whether people engage similar prediction-related processes for definite and indefinite referents. This question is relevant for linguistic theories that imply a processing difference between definite and indefinite noun phrases, typically because definiteness is thought to require a uniquely identifiable referent in the discourse. We addressed this question in an event-related potential (ERP) study (N = 48) with preregistration of data acquisition, preprocessing, and Bayesian analysis. Participants read Dutch mini-stories with a definite or indefinite novel noun phrase (e.g., “het/een huis,” the/a house), wherein (in)definiteness of the article was either expected or unexpected and the noun was always strongly expected. Unexpected articles elicited enhanced N400s, but unexpectedly indefinite articles also elicited a positive ERP effect at frontal channels compared to expectedly indefinite articles. We tentatively link this effect to an antiuniqueness violation, which may force people to introduce a new referent over and above the already anticipated one. Interestingly, expectedly definite nouns elicited larger N400s than unexpectedly definite nouns (replicating a previous surprising finding) and indefinite nouns. Although the exact nature of these noun effects remains unknown, expectedly definite nouns may have triggered the strongest semantic activation because they alone refer to specific and concrete referents. In sum, results from both the articles and nouns clearly demonstrate that definiteness marking has a rapid effect on processing, counter to recent claims regarding definiteness processing

Information structure and the referential status of linguistic expression : workshop as part of the 23th annual meetings of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft in Leipzig, Leipzig, February 28 - March 2, 2001

This volume comprises papers that were given at the workshop Information Structure and the Referential Status of Linguistic Expressions, which we organized during the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) Conference in Leipzig in February 2001. At this workshop we discussed the connection between information structure and the referential interpretation of linguistic expressions, a topic mostly neglected in current linguistics research. One common aim of the papers is to find out to what extent the focus-background as well as the topic-comment structuring determine the referential interpretation of simple arguments like definite and indefinite NPs on the one hand and sentences on the other

Definiteness effects and competition in tenses and aspects

This dissertations explores the semantics and pragmatics of tense and aspect constructions in three groups of languages: I. English; II. French, Italian, German; III. Mandarin Chinese. The basic claims of this dissertation are: (i) the English past tense is lexically ambiguous between an anaphoric and a uniqueness reading; (ii) the different properties of the present perfect construction in English versus French, Italian and German follow from the competition between the present perfect with the alternative past tense and the different set of alternatives available in these languages; (iii) the distribution of the Mandarin Chinese perfective particles reflects asymmetry in their presuppositions, such as anaphoricity and anti-resultativeness; (iv) Mandarin Chinese differs from the languages in group I and II in that it establishes anaphoric dependency in the domain of eventualities, not times; (v) the crosslinguistic distribution of perfect-like tense-aspectual constructions follows from similar semantic-pragmatic strategies, namely the competition between alternatives from a set of general categories (anaphoric, unique, neutral, and antiresulative)

Definiteness across languages

Definiteness has been a central topic in theoretical semantics since its modern foundation. However, despite its significance, there has been surprisingly scarce research on its cross-linguistic expression. With the purpose of contributing to filling this gap, the present volume gathers thirteen studies exploiting insights from formal semantics and syntax, typological and language specific studies, and, crucially, semantic fieldwork and cross-linguistic semantics, in order to address the expression and interpretation of definiteness in a diverse group of languages, most of them understudied

Definiteness across languages

Definiteness has been a central topic in theoretical semantics since its modern foundation. However, despite its significance, there has been surprisingly scarce research on its cross-linguistic expression. With the purpose of contributing to filling this gap, the present volume gathers thirteen studies exploiting insights from formal semantics and syntax, typological and language specific studies, and, crucially, semantic fieldwork and cross-linguistic semantics, in order to address the expression and interpretation of definiteness in a diverse group of languages, most of them understudied. The papers presented in this volume aim to establish a dialogue between theory and data in order to answer the following questions: What formal strategies do natural languages employ to encode definiteness? What are the possible meanings associated to this notion across languages? Are there different types of definite reference? Which other functions (besides marking definite reference) are associated with definite descriptions? Each of the papers contained in this volume addresses at least one of these questions and, in doing so, they aim to enrich our understanding of definiteness

Definiteness across languages

Definiteness has been a central topic in theoretical semantics since its modern foundation. However, despite its significance, there has been surprisingly scarce research on its cross-linguistic expression. With the purpose of contributing to filling this gap, the present volume gathers thirteen studies exploiting insights from formal semantics and syntax, typological and language specific studies, and, crucially, semantic fieldwork and cross-linguistic semantics, in order to address the expression and interpretation of definiteness in a diverse group of languages, most of them understudied

The semantics of (in)definiteness in bare vs. non-bare nominals: A study of Kannada and English

This thesis investigates the semantics of two classes of definite expressions in English and Kannada, namely (i) ordinary definite descriptions — expressed using the definite determiner 'the' in English, and the determinerless bare nominal in Kannada, and (ii) demonstrative descriptions — expressed using overt demonstrative determiners in both languages. Alongside this contribution, this work also serves as the first detailed study of bare noun phrases in Kannada, a language without overt definite and indefinite articles. In English, I report results from a set of experiments testing the comprehension and production of definite and demonstrative expressions ('the book' and 'that book' respectively), within contexts that vary in whether the intended referent is uniquely described (uniqueness), whether it has been previously mentioned (familiarity), and how recently it was mentioned. The results of these experiments favor a probabilistic hybrid account of 'the' that integrates effects of uniqueness as well as familiarity of the potential referents, winning over traditional, categorical accounts that rely solely on uniqueness or familiarity. In Kannada, based on a close investigation of (in)definite bare nominals, I propose an account of these nominals as items that are underspecified for (in)definiteness, relying on a specific mechanism for domain restriction to predict whether a definite or indefinite reading arises in a given context. I present this as an alternative to the uniqueness-familiarity dichotomy that has recently been posited in other languages with bare nominal arguments, where the definite bare nominal is claimed to lexically presuppose standard uniqueness while the demonstrative presupposes familiarity. One main conclusion that emerges is that there isn’t a strict independence of definite vs. indefinite meanings in bare nominals. Consequently, the distribution of their definite uses cannot be studied separately of their indefinite uses. I show that a similar mechanism can be extended to English definite descriptions as well, supplemented by the assumption that 'the' contributes a presupposition of 'determined reference'. This successfully explains the experimental findings reported in this thesis. Finally, a unified analysis of the indefinite readings in Kannada bare nominals is developed, closely interfacing with the literature on semantic incorporation and crosslinguistic verbal plurality operators