What licenses the use of a definite description? The formal and philosophical literature has approached this question in two ways. The uniqueness approach (Frege, 1892; Russell, 1905; Strawson, 1950) holds that we may use a definite determiner only if the property denoted by its complement holds of exactly one individual in some domain: Sentence (1) and (2) can only be true if there is exactly one king of France, and exactly one American governor, respectively. Since this is not the case (...) in the actual world, the sentences are either false or (on most modern accounts) fall prey to a presupposition failure. (shrink)

Machery et al. presented data suggesting the existence of cross-cultural variation in judgments about the reference of proper names. In this paper, we examine a previously overlooked confound in the subsequent studies that attempt to replicate the results of Machery et al. using East Asian languages. Machery et al. and Sytsma et al. claim that they have successfully replicated the original finding with probes written in Chinese and Japanese, respectively. These studies, however, crucially rely on uses of articleless, ‘bare noun (...) phrases’ in Chinese and Japanese, which according to the linguistic literature are known to be multiply ambiguous. We argue that it becomes questionable whether the extant studies using East Asian languages revealed genuine cross-cultural variation when the probes are reevaluated based on a proper linguistic understanding of Chinese and Japanese bare noun phrases and English definite descriptions. We also present two experiments on native Japanese speakers that controlled the use of ambiguous bare noun phrases, the results of which suggest that the judgments of Japanese speakers concerning the reference of proper names may not diverge from those of English speakers. (shrink)

Over the past fifty years the philosophy of language and mind has been dominated by a nondescriptivist approach to content and reference. This book attempts to recast and systematize that approach by offering an indexical model in terms of mental files. According to Recanati, we refer through mental files, the function of which is to store information derived through certain types of contextual relation the subject bears to objects in his or her environment. The reference of a file is determined (...) relationally, not satisfactionally, so a file is not to be equated to the body of (mis-)information it contains. Mental files are the mental equivalent of singular terms, and the reference of linguistic expressions is inherited from that of the files we associate with them. On this approach, mental files, the vehicles of singular thought, do all the work of so-called 'modes of presentation' in Fregean and neo-Russellian theories. (shrink)

Previous theorists have claimed that Russell’s theory of definite descriptions gives the wrong truth conditions to sentences in which definite descriptions are embedded under certain other operators; but the other operators used, such as conditionals and propositional attitude verbs, have introduced intensional and hyperintensional complications that might be thought to obscure the point against Russell. This paper shows that the same kind of problem arises when the operator in question allows the context to be extensional. It is further argued that (...) presuppositional theories of definite descriptions give intuitively satisfying analyses of the novel data. (shrink)

This paper should be read against the backdrop of three lines of linguistic investigation: the investigation of the Perfect construction, which has received considerable attention, going back to Reichenbach ; the working hypothesis that certain verbal constructions can be described in terms of the semantics of determiners on nominal expressions, with which we are more familiar; the common observation that we talk about time the way we talk about space. The focus of the paper is a particular construction in Greek. (...) As always, however, the search for the solution of a particular question reveals many other questions in the process and this paper should be seen as being also about a number of related puzzles in English and other languages. (shrink)

Explicatures are not cancellable. Theoretical considerations.

(1) adapted from (Higginbotham, 2006): (black instead of red) a. Do you see the man in (or: wearing) the black hat? b. #Do you see the man in (or: wearing) a black hat?

This paper argues that mental models of discourse are key in any theory of the interpretation of definite descriptions. It considers both referential and attributive uses of such descriptions, in the sense introduced by Donnellan.

A recent challenge to Russell’s theory of definite description centers upon the divergent behavior of definites and their Russellian paraphrases in non-extensional contexts. Russellians can meet this challenge, I argue, by incorporating the familiarity theory of definiteness into Russell’s theory. The synthesis of these two seemingly incompatible theories produces a conceptually consistent and empirically powerful framework. As I show, the coalescence of Russellianism and the familiarity theory of definiteness stands as a legitimate alternative to both Traditional Russellianism and alternative semantic (...) frameworks. (shrink)

This paper argues for a particular semantic decomposition of morphological definiteness. I propose that the meaning of ‘the’ comprises two distinct compositional operations. The first builds a set of witnesses that satisfy the restricting noun phrase. The second tests this set for uniqueness. The motivation for decomposing the denotation of the definite determiner in this way comes from split-scope intervention effects. The two components—the selection of witnesses on the one hand and the counting of witnesses on the other—may take effect (...) at different points in the composition of a constituent, and this has non-trivial semantic consequences when other operators inside the DP take action in between them. In particular, I analyze well-known examples of mutually recursive definite descriptions like ‘the rabbit in the hat’ as examples of definites whose referent-introducing and referent-testing components are interleaved rather than nested. I further demonstrate that this picture leads to a new theory of relative superlative descriptions like ‘the kid who climbed the highest tree’, which explains the previously mysterious role of the definite determiner in licensing such readings. (shrink)

Signaling of relations is an open question in rhetorical structure theory. Discourse markers are the unmistakable signals of a relation. However, it may be argued that all relations – and not only those involving discourse markers – are signaled in some way. Based on this assumption, this article focuses on two causal relations, ‘Cause’ and ‘Result’, working on an RST double-annotated corpus in Spanish. The main objectives are to identify different signals of Cause and Result relations and to evaluate the (...) ambiguity resulting from those signals. Results demonstrate that a) almost all Cause and Result relations on the corpus are signaled; b) each signal obtains differentiated annotation agreements; and c) patterns of annotation disagreement are grounded in the nature of the signal and not in the relations’ semantic features. (shrink)

The argument from convention contends that the regular use of definite descriptions as referential devices strongly implies that a referential semantic convention underlies such usage. On the presumption that definite descriptions also participate in a quantificational semantic convention, the argument from convention has served as an argument for the thesis that the English definite article is ambiguous. Here, I revisit this relatively new argument. First, I address two recurring criticisms of the argument from convention: its alleged tendency to overgenerate and (...) its apparent evidential inadequacy. These criticisms are found wanting. Second, following Zacharska, I argue that while the argument from convention does alter the landscape of logical possibilities insofar as it provides good grounds for treating Donnellan’s referential–attributive distinction as having truth-conditional consequences, the argument from convention nonetheless fails to demonstrate that ‘the’ requires two lexical entries. (shrink)

Ever since the publication of Halliday and Hasan, cohesion analysis has received much attention in several branches of linguistics. Lexical cohesion in particular has been shown to contribute to the coherence of discourse in a number of ways, and specific patterns of lexical cohesion have emerged as relevant for the description of different registers and genres. In the present article I challenge existing models of lexical cohesion and offer a revised one which affords particular attention to what I call ‘associative (...) cohesion’. I go on to test the adequacy of the proposed framework in a corpus of 15 telephone conversations extracted from the International Corpus of English-Great Britain. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods the article analyses 3480 ties and demonstrates that telephone conversations are lexically cohesive mostly due to repetitions, associative cohesion and inclusive relations, which overwhelmingly occur across the turns and over remote-mediated spans. In addition, lexical patterns are shown to collaborate in topic management processes and to be sensitive to genre-specific factors, thereby demonstrating the descriptive potential and applicability of the framework. (shrink)