This thesis confronts the semantic/pragmatic issues raised by identification
- based descriptive uses of pronouns. The phenomenon, also
known as deferred uses (Nunberg, 1993), arises when the correct understanding
of a pronoun is dependent on the identification of a specific
individual in the context that provides it with a descriptive (as opposed
to a singular) interpretation. Moreover, the identification of the salient
individual makes the interpretation available in a rather indirect way.
For example, by pointing at a huge footprint in the sand and uttering
‘He must be a giant’, the speaker can convey the proposition that the
footprint maker must be a giant, where the mental representation footprint
(necessary for identification) and the representation the footprintmaker
(the pronoun’s interpretation) are not identical. These uses also
display interesting properties when it comes to their ability to provide
antecedents for other pronouns. As such, they are at the cross-road of
many topics in philosophy of language and linguistics, including indexicality,
anaphora, and figurative uses of language (metonymy). In this
thesis, I propose that the data is best accounted for by a combination
of relevance-theoretic pragmatics (Sperber and Wilson 1995, Carston
2002), certain motivated assumptions about visual information processing,
and the grammar formalism of Dynamic Syntax (Kempson et al
2001; Cann et al 2005). DS models pronouns as encoding procedures
that introduce a variable-like entity (e.g. a metavariable), which needs
to be replaced by a semantic value (of the appropriate type), allowing
for descriptive constituents, which emerge as a result of relevance-driven
processes of identification and inference, to provide the pronoun
with the relevant descriptive interpretation. Alternatively, the pronoun
can be replaced by a singular value that communicates a descriptive
proposition as an implicature. The context and the pronominal form
used determine which of these approaches is the best suited