A four-way distinction in English definite expressions
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Analyses of pronouns, definite descriptions, and demonstratives range from treating them to be independent of each other to treating them with parallel semantics. In this paper, I compare the semantic contribution of different building blocks of these expressions and propose to delineate the semantic space of definite descriptions along two dimensions: between the form of the content (pronominal vs. description) and the mechanism of reference (anaphoric vs. deictic). To support this, I provide two pieces of evidence. First, I show that deictic and anaphoric pronouns have distinct semantic and distributional properties. Second, I show that the NP content of a definite description makes the same semantic contribution as the gender inference of a pronoun.
Author: Ahn, Dorothy
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W6962604650
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: